Deem has acquired hotel travel technology provider Olset, Deem president and COO John Rizzo announced today during The Beat Live conference in Chicago.
Olset's technology works to improve conversion rates for online travel agencies and increase hotel attachment rates for travel management companies through sentiment data, by scanning 500,000 hotels and 60 million reviews and extracting 200 million separate data points from hotels "so that when you're a traveler and you go online to book a hotel, hotels that match your preference will pop to the top," Rizzo said.
"This acquisition allows us to inject AI machine learning into our travel platform so that we can drive conversion rates or attach rates to hotels quite dramatically," Rizzo said. "Five percent, 10 percent are some numbers that we've demonstrated."
Olset entered the corporate travel space a little over a year ago by inking deals to provide sentiment data to Adelman travelers during the pre-booking and post-booking process and to feed sentiment data to Amadeus' hotel Web services via an API. The company, too, has partnerships in place with multiple OTAs that it has not shared publicly.
Rizzo said Olset's existing partners will become Deem's partners, "and we'll continue to drive volume there." At first, Olset will continue to operate as a standalone technology. Then it will be woven into Deem's platform. Rizzo noted that the integration also will work in tandem with Deem's internal policy management. That means not only that travelers will see hotels that match their preferences, based on their previous booking behavior and traveler profile, but also that nonpreferred properties will be suppressed.
Rizzo did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. It is expected to close within 45 days, according to Olset CEO Gadi Bashvitz.