Sure this week’s HITEC is about mobile strategies, PCI compliance and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) but there is another undercurrent buzzing across the show floor: Consolidation.
Just look at the HITEC party list for this week and you can see the blending of the “brands.”
In the last 12 months, mergers and acquisitions are turning the tide on traditional channels of services and evolving to one-stop shopping platforms for hotels from reservation to revenue.
Here are just a few:
Newmarket International has been busy adding to its arsenal of companies designed to build arguably the most robust meeting and event platform available in the hospitality industry today. Recent acquisition of Meeting Matrix, MTECH and Libra on Demand make it easy to breeze by their collaborative booth spaces to discuss all things related to meetings and events.
Another acquisition worth noting is Pegasus Solutions’ snatching up of online marketing company Open Hospitality. The addition of services such as web site and mobile site development, Internet marketing, search engine marketing, and social media services bundled with Pegasus’ reservations and booking solutions, enables hotels to market and sell their most profitable room inventories on the Internet.
And candidly, after yesterday’s education super session on the state of hotel distribution, this is a blended offering worth taking note of as hotels must align their booking and marketing strategies to gain any sort of brand equity with consumers.
TravelClick has also done a lot of shopping in the past year acquiring both competitor Rubicon and portfolio-booster EZYield. Rubicon is now part of the TravelClick’s Hoteligence360 platform while EZYield will soon become part of the iHotelier CRS solution.
Enterprise software company Infor recently snapped up SaaS hotel revenue management system provider Easy RMS, expanding its Infor10 hospitality platform.
And those aren’t all of them.
What does this mean for our industry?
If this year’s well-attended HITEC is any indication, I think these mergers and acquisitions are a good sign that the hospitality technology market is stabilizing and healthy.
Next in line to join the consolidation game will be companies that manipulate and analyze data, including hotel/restaurant unit reporting providers, yield, channel, upsell and customer relationship management firms, and perhaps property management and point-of-sale system vendors.
With so many small to medium-sized companies in pursuit of market fragments, it would be a natural development in an industry.
The bridging of these players makes for a more intense level of channel-management and revenue-management functionality and support.
Nicole Hockin is vice president of marketing and public relations for Nor1, Inc., a technology leader in upsell solutions and exhibitor at HITEC 2012. She thrives on the creation of successful brand development and strategic communications. Follow her on Twitter @travelnicole.
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