The Global Distribution System (GDS) is an international, interconnected network of travel agents and travel websites. Because the traditional GDS systems are only a fraction of the ways people research and book travel these days, when combined with non-traditional networks, BookingCenter refers to the entirety as the Global Booking Network.
The BookingCenter Global Booking Network gives your property real-time visibility on over 8,200 travel websites, including the Sabre, WorldSpan, Amadeus, and Galileo GDS systems (used by over 650,000 travel agents worldwide), the Pegasus system (which provides distribution to TravelWeb, Expedia, Hotwire, Orbitz and others), and other consumer networks such as YellowPages.com, Verizon SuperPages, and TourWorld. See a sample list of partner sites here http://www.bookingcenter.com/partners.html.
Agent Relationships
If you wish to manually select different rates for the Travel Agents and the GDS systems, do the following:
- Find the Agent WR and under the 'Allocate Rate' drop down for the Room Type, choose the Rate that you want published to the GDS system.
- You may use also choose to use Network Loading for these rates as well.
- Once this has been done for ALL ROOM TYPES, click 'Update All' to save the changes. Now, when a viewer queries for your rooms through any of these Agents, they will see the rates and rooms you made available to them.
If you wish to CLOSE OUT dates on some/all of your contracted OTA (Online Travel Agents), then do not simply remove allocations and think that will stop bookings. Keep in mind, each OTA you have a signed agreement with (Expedia, Booking.com, Orbitz, etc) has a list of the Room Types you wish to sell on their system, and those are 'mapped' to rates that are managed in BookingCenter. If you simply remove the mapped rates from BookingCenter, by deleting the Type/rates allocation, then in some systems that causes a complete block out, but in others it opens up the rooms for 'free sell'. Instead, to accomplish a 'close out' you have 2 choices:
1) Use the Manage Rates screen to either set the rates going to the OTA(s) very high (such as as an edit from $100/nt to $250/nt) or set the dates to 'close to arrival' so that the date can't allow an arriving booking. Because you don't have to worry about availability (that happens seamlessly) using the rate to manage when you want to 'close out' a specific channel is the best option.
The other option is:
2) Call your account manager at the specific OTA(s) and tell them you need to close out and they can do so for you. But remember that you will need to contact the your account manager at the specific OTA(s) and tell them you need to OPEN back up, or you cold remain inactive longer than desired.
Learn more about automating your relationship with the Net Rate/Merchant Model companies at: http://www.bookingcenter.com/products/net_rate.html
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