· Supplier Integration · GenX eSolutions
Connecting to five hotel suppliers is an integration task with a known shape. Making those five sets of results look like one coherent list of hotels is a different problem entirely, and it is where most multi-supplier hotel projects lose time.
The problem in one example
A single property in Dubai might arrive as Grand Hyatt Dubai from one supplier, Hyatt Grand Dubai Festival City from another, and GRAND HYATT DUBAI (DXB) from a third — with three different identifiers, three slightly different addresses, and coordinates that disagree by a few hundred metres. Show them unmapped and the customer sees three hotels. Show them badly mapped and you risk merging two genuinely different properties, which produces a booking at the wrong hotel.
What mapping actually involves
- Identifier matching. Where suppliers support a common standard such as GIATA, use it. This handles the majority and should always be the first pass.
- Geospatial proximity. Properties within a small radius are mapping candidates. The radius needs care — dense hotel districts will produce false positives.
- Fuzzy name matching. Normalised string comparison, after stripping chain prefixes, punctuation and location suffixes.
- Address comparison. Useful as a confirming signal, unreliable as a primary one, because address formatting varies enormously by supplier and market.
- Manual review. Unavoidable for the remainder. The goal is to make that remainder small and to make reviewing it fast.
Getting the confidence threshold right
The instinct is to map aggressively so results look clean. This is the wrong instinct. A false merge — two different hotels shown as one — produces a customer arriving at the wrong property, which is a refund and a complaint. A missed merge produces a slightly untidy result list. Set the automatic threshold high, and route everything below it to human review.
Mapping is not a one-time job
Suppliers add properties, rename them, correct coordinates and occasionally reissue identifiers. A mapping set built once and never revisited degrades steadily. Treat it as a continuously running process with monitoring on unmapped-property counts, not as a milestone to be completed.