Leading hotel channel management and connectivity solution provider eRevMax today announced its partnership with World Independent Hotel Promotion (WIHP) to offer meta-search management capabilities. Through this partnership, hotel customers of eRevMax’s RateTiger and Connect solutions can push real-time rates and availabilities to Google Hotel Finder, TripAdvisor, Trivago, Kayak and WeGo, to drive more booking traffic directly to their own booking engine.

eRevMax now provides XML interface connectivity to all channel classes (OTAs, wholesalers, tour operators, social media, meta-search sites) from a single platform and allow hoteliers to bid for higher positions in the meta-search channels and increase the visibility of the rates available on the hotels’ website. WIHP will also provide hotels with a managed service to execute the bid management process from a digital marketing perspective based upon a monthly or daily advertising budget.

World Independent Hotel Promotion vice-president of sales and marketing Martin Soler said: "While meta-search has existed for several years, it hasn’t been available as a direct booking channel for hotels on a broad scale. A few years ago we made it our business to give access to meta-search and all levels of qualified direct booking leads to hotels. By working with eRevMax we’re giving this access to tens of thousands of hotels which is a great thing for everyone who wants to increase direct bookings."

eRevMax CEO Michael McCartan said: "Meta-search has become really mainstream and has witnessed a 13% growth in travel search traffic over last year. With over 28% travellers preferring meta-search to compare hotel rates, it is a highly effective tool that will allow our customer hotels to reach out to a much larger audience and offer an extended scope for pushing more direct bookings through a direct booking eco-system of meta-search sites."

This new offering will help hotels to increase bookings and revenue for their property, by driving qualified leads from meta-search sites to their own website. This will help them to reduce OTA commissions and improve overall profitability. The advanced tracking available with the service will help hotels to know the exact return on investment for each meta-search channel they are advertising on. They will have access to custom-built hotel analytics platform, where they can monitor the performance of their campaign and most importantly, see the revenue generated by the campaign.

The new functionality is immediately available to all existing hotel customers of eRevMax.