TripBAM Shops Hotel Rates — and Saves

Travel agencies can white-label tripBAM, a new service that automatically monitors the rates of selected hotels and alerts the agent when a new rate beats a pre-determined threshold.

TripBAM is the brainchild of Steve Reynolds, a travel technology veteran. He got the idea when a friend boasted of a fantastic hotel rate that he snagged because his excellent executive assistant monitored rates manually on a daily basis.

Reynolds decided there had to be a better way and set about automating the process.

Consumer version
In the consumer version of tripBAM, the user creates a “cluster” of hotels – “it can be one hotel or 250, as many as you like,” he said – and tripBAM will shop across them every day and every night.

As prices drop – and they do in a surprising number of cases – reservations can be automatically canceled and rebooked.

By monitoring rates day and night, “tripBAM will find a lower rate 80% of the time,” Reynolds said.

“Most users will look at one or two sites and give up, and end up with a mediocre rate,” he added.

Agency version
In the agency version, when a reservation lands on a queue in the GDS, it is robotically pulled off and analyzed to determine whether it is “tripBAM-worthy.” If it is, it is sent to tripBAM for monitoring.

“Agents are going to spend the time to do this, so we use Pegasus Solutions’ UltraDirect switch,” Reynolds said. The searches commence with one command.

Reynolds has been testing the concept for three months with agencies and corporate clients, some of whom wondered how it would fit into their managed travel programs.

But when they loaded it up with searches and found that it was beating their negotiated rates, they loved it, he said.

Revenue potential
Hickory Global Partners named tripBAM a preferred technology partner and noted that it could bring in new revenues to its agency members.

Agencies will be able to charge an additional service fee to their customers, which can increase as savings are found.

TripBAM also enables agencies to convert net bookings to commissionable bookings, while still saving the traveler money, Hickory said.