Premier Partner of Booking.com for the third time running and Preferred Partner 2021 in Expedia’s new partner programme
Berlin, 12 May 2021. With partner programmes, OTAs such as Booking.com and Expedia want to ensure a high interface and service quality of their connectivity partners. The channel management provider CultSwitch regularly ranks among the partners with the most modern systems, the most reliable data transfer and the best services.
OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) know that their business success depends significantly on the systems and services of their connectivity partners. Channel managers and hotel software (PMS) providers automatically report the hotels’ current room vacancies to the OTA portals. Their work determines how reliably hotel offers are displayed on the portals and guest data are transmitted to the hosts. Connectivity partner programmes are designed to identify weaknesses and potential for improvement in those processes.
While Booking.com has been evaluating the systems and services of its connectivity partners with a partner status for some time, Expedia Group awarded such a status for the first time in April 2021. Both programmes measure the breadth of interfaces as well as their reliability, i.e. the error rate when transferring data. Also very important, however, is the active cooperation of the partners with the portals in providing the most comprehensive support possible for their mutual customers. CultSwitch attaches particular emphasis to this and supports its hotels in making the best possible use of the portals’ offers.
At Booking.com, CultSwitch achieved the top status of “Premier Partner” for the third time running, thus demonstrating the consistently high quality and functionality of its interfaces and the very good cooperation with the portal. At Expedia Group, CultSwitch is one of only 33 partners with Preferred or Elite status out of a total number of several hundred partners, and one of only three in the German-speaking world.
“We have achieved a special status with the world’s most important travel portals,” says Robert Reinsch, Head of Customer Care and Partner Management at CultSwitch. “We are particularly pleased that as preferred partners we can do even more for the success of our customers. After all, among the benefits the portals offer their top partners is preferential treatment when it comes to interface enhancements and support.”