Hotel Distribution Systems

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Market Summary

Market Overview

The field for Hotel Distribution Systems is expansive, especially when considering all the technologies that are part of ensuring a reservation and its associated information gets from the consumer to the hotel. As a result, Capsolve needed to create an understandable approach to this research report. The simplification chosen to accomplish this was to treat Hotel Distribution Solutions as an overlay capability across the top of many technology categories. This causes us to ask one question of each solution considered for this analysis. That is, does the solution facilitate hotel transactions at any part of their lifecycle?

However, qualifying technology in this manner causes us to consider an unwieldy number of solutions. Therefore, the study excludes the solutions that are solidly within the categories of CRS, PMS, IBE, Channel Managers, Website Management & Marketing, and Content Distribution. That said, the solutions within these categories that have a less traditional approach to distribution or had a more comprehensive set of capabilities were included. When appropriate, those companies that were also included encompassed Switching Services, Mega-Product companies with significant distribution capabilities and Hotel Distribution Solutions that were relevant to individual properties in addition to brands. Finally, solutions typically known to be an endpoint, such as CRS, Website CMS or OTA may be included if they reached further along the hotel distribution stream in either direction.

As of this writing, Capsolve has identified 80 Hotel Distribution Systems designed specifically for the needs of the industry that were considered for this research. Historically, this category was marketed to larger hotel companies, but this has changed as the solutions began to accommodate individual properties. This has occurred over the course of many years due to multiple factors and ultimately stems from the wide variation of needs across the industry.

As seen in the above image, Hotel Distribution Systems are delivered across the globe by companies headquartered in many parts of the world. The United States has a significant share of those tracked in Capsolve’s research and it represents approximately 46% of the total, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain. When factoring in the complete Hotel Distribution landscape across multiple categories, the international presence is much more prominent.

Marketplace Context

As with other categories within hospitality, this dispersion extends well beyond the geographic headquarters of the solution providers into the actual functionality of their respective solutions. The reality is that you will find almost any combination of functionality within this marketplace depending upon your business needs. However, sifting through these and hundreds more vendors that play a role in hotel distribution may become overwhelming regardless of your level of technological prowess.

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About this Report

This document details a review of the marketing information and capabilities associated with this category’s solutions and the surrounding technology ecosystem. It contains original content written by Capsolve to provide a perspective of current trends affecting one or more of the hotel, restaurant and golf & country clubs industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.