WORLDHOTELS has enhanced its Resmaster hotel booking engine to provide hotel affiliates with greater control and flexibility, as well as added online sales opportunities.

The upgraded Resmaster V3 features easy-to-use configuration options, filters for tailored results, a price slider and multiple room-booking capabilities. It can also be integrated into Google Maps and Hotel Finder.

“A hotel’s website is often the first (point of) contact any new guest will have with that property,” said Paulo Salvador, global vice president, marketing and sales of Worldhotels. “Resmaster V3 has all the tools needed to convert a casual looker into a loyal guest. This helps our hotels to take charge of channel management and drive bookings via their own websites, thus making them less dependent on third parties.”

Roland Jegge, vice president Asia-Pacific, Worldhotels explained that these "third parties" were online travel agencies “whose costs were prohibitive, and who were eating into the margins of our hotels without adding much value to the booking process”.

When asked whether the upgraded booking engine accords greater booking independence to hotel affiliates, thus reducing dependency on travel expert distribution, Jegge said Resmaster V3 allowed travel expert access and offered a commission payment for bookings made.

“As well, the Worldhotels.com website, which is powered by the same Resmaster V3 booking engine, has a Be Connected dedicated section for travel experts, where they can track commission payment and insert their IATA code in order to get commission for their bookings,” said Jegge.

Jegge also pointed out that Worldhotels had maintained a “strong partnership with travel experts” for over 40 years and was "strongly committed to doing so into the future”.

More than 60 per cent of Worldhotels' revenues generated for hotels are from travel experts.