TripStax to Add Hotel Booking Capabilities with Hotelzon Acquisition

Travel management technology company TripStax has acquired hotel booking platform Hotelzon from Travelport, with plans to use the platform to offer a “fully integrated hotel booking tool” for corporate and travel management company clients, the company announced.

TripStax launched earlier this year as a spinoff of TMC ATPI, making ATPI’s technology available to other TMCs and corporate customers in the form of modules connected to a central data processing system, “The Core.” Current modules include Analytics, Approve, Content, Docs, Mobile, Portal, Profile and Track, and Hotelzon will be integrated as an additional module, according to TripStax.

In addition to a hotel booking module, TripStax will use the acquisition to “add a serious hotel flavor to the TripStax Content module,” according to TripStax CEO Jack Ramsey. The module currently aggregates and normalizes air content from both global distribution systems and non-GDS sources on a single API, and Hotelzon will let TripStax manage hotel booking data within the module as well.

Travelport acquired Hotelzon in 2014, and it since has been a wholly owned subsidiary. Ramsey was director of global sales for Hotelzon at Travelport prior to his move to ATPI in advance of the TripStax spinoff.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but TripStax said it includes establishment of “a long-term strategic relationship between TripStax and Travelport,” in which Hotelzon will continue to generate hotel bookings on the Travelport Plus platform.

TripStax plans “to further invest in the [Hotelzon] team to strengthen existing customer and supplier relationships and realize the full potential of this joint opportunity,” Ramsey said in a statement.

The acquisition is TripStax’s second since its launch. This summer, it acquired online booking platform TapTrip, which was launched in 2018 with a focus on small and midsized clientele and counted ATPI among its multiple shareholders. TripStax also earned an honorable mention this summer at the 2022 Business Travel Innovation Faceoff at Business Travel Show Europe in London.

Michael B. Baker www.businesstravelnews.com