Premier Inn, UK and Ireland's biggest and fastest growing hotel company, and KDS, a leading international provider of Travel & Expense (T&E) management systems today announced the availability of the budget hotel chain's inventory to KDS's clients. This agreement comes at a time when organisations are increasingly searching for great value hotel accommodation.
KDS’s Software-as-a Service products allow employees to plan and book their travel and manage their expense reports. Companies rely on KDS products to monitor and control their company’s travel & expense (T&E) spend.
With the integration and pilot phase completed, the entire inventory of Premier Inn’s 600 properties is accessible via KDS. This integration is totally transparent to the users of KDS Corporate: hotel searches will display Premier Inn content as part of a broader list of search results.
KDS directly accesses Premier Inn’s reservation systems, meaning that additional information such as venue photos, booking options and room amenities will also be available.
As always, travel and procurement managers can control how to display and promote Premier Inn by adjusting the rules of their travel policy in the application.
"Our clients, organisations of all sizes, are increasingly turning to KDS for ways to cut their travel spend," says Dean Forbes, KDS EVP Sales & Marketing. "By teaming with Premier Inn we are adding a great value hotel chain to our inventory. What’s more, we are doing this by accessing the supplier directly, bypassing the GDSs and thus reducing transaction costs."
Premier Inn is amongst seven other non-GDS hotel hubs providing their hotel inventory, via KDS products, to business travellers.
Travel managers can tightly control the search results of hotels. "They can associate properties to locations - cities or company sites for example - or managers can decide to promote particular suppliers above others," says Dan Fitzgerald, Director of Product Management at KDS. "The sophistication of our hotel policy criteria has been a key development theme for KDS in the last couple of years. Hotel accommodation is the new area where companies are hunting for big savings, and we now have some very powerful tools to help them achieve their goals. Our clients can be very creative in deciding how to encourage on-program booking. When these rules are used together with air tickets and fare combinations our customers are rapidly seeing T&E cost reduction in the 10 to 25% range.”
Commenting on the announcement, Luke Goggin, Head of Sales for Whitbread said: “We are delighted that KDS has chosen to integrate our Premier Connect product into their corporate booking engine. At Premier Inn we work constantly to ensure we are providing our third party partners with the most advanced technology solutions which meet their requirements and enable them to provide the best service to their customers. Via Premier Connect we have developed an automated solution which enables our partners to fully integrate our content seamlessly into their own reservation and booking systems.”
Properties from the Premier Inn group have been made available to all KDS Corporate clients. KDS clients are invited to contact their KDS Account Manager to enable the service. There is a configuration fee to set-up the service.
About Premier Inn
Award-winning Premier Inn is the UK’s biggest budget hotel brand with over 600 budget hotels and more than 43,000 rooms across the UK and Ireland. Premier Inn bedrooms feature en-suite bathrooms, TV with Freeview channels, and WiFi internet access. All Premier Inns feature a bar and restaurant; situated inside the hotel or adjacent, offering a wide range of food choices.
