As a principle, iVectorOne maps the properties across multiple suppliers for you and exposes all of the raw data (room types, meal bases, facilities, content etc) as provided by the supplier in the search and content responses. There's good reason for this (explained below), but there's also additional features on the iVectorOne roadmap you should be aware of:
Meal bases: The suppliers do not use standard meal bases. For example, Hotelbeds has 54 meal bases, Expedia has 16, and OTS has 11. From a cursory glance, Hotelbeds has 7 different All Inclusive categories. We think that you are better placed to map these meal bases in your system to suit your business and other product sources. Meal basis options do not tend to change, so this is a small mapping job that only needs to be done once when activating a new supplier.
We’ll pre-share the meal basis codes and, in a near-term release, these will be available via an API.
In a future release of iVectorOne, we will provide a mapping tool within the portal so you can manage the mappings here rather than in your own platform, if prefered.
Facilities: Similar to meal bases, these are disparate sets of data where you are best placed to choose the level of granularity you present and how to map these. E.g. Do you just want 'swimming pool' and then map all variants to it, or would you like to split out Indoor/Outdoor/Heated etc and map to these? iVectorOne's role is to present you the data for you to make a choice of how to map this on your side.
Room Types: Room type mapping has been a perennial requirement and issue in the travel industry. Somewhere between the hotels actual named room types, the bedbanks systems and the aggregators, the naming convention has got lost and it's challenging to map them back up. intuitive have been working on solving this with GIATA and we're confident the room type mapping products they can now offer are the best possible solutions on the market. By mid-2023 we'll be integrating this feature within iVectorOne so you can receive the very best price and availability from each of your supply sources at room type level. An additional commercial agreement will be required to access this feature.