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Block accommodation procurement platform Vindow has been
building up its direct relationships with corporate customers and is now aiming
to make moves with top travel management companies, CEO Vic Pynn said.
Vindow was launched in 2019 by Ken Shanley—who in 1997 had
founded Hotel Connections, which helped airline crews procure
accommodations—and
Pynn joined the company as CEO last year. Its aim is to alleviate the
“confusion and heartache” around booking block space at hotels, Pynn
said.
“Corporations and agencies that want to procure block
rooms had very low response rates coming from hotels,” he said. “On
the hotel side, they are inundated with tens of thousands of [requests for
proposal]and especially post-pandemic, they don’t have the sales staff and
don’t know how, where and when to respond to the best ones to drive revenue.
It’s not an effective process.”
For buyers, Vindow’s marketplace enables them to put
together an RFP and send it off immediately to thousands of hotels, if they so
desire, and receive responses by email. Vindow also provides some services to
help with the transactions, such as following up with buyers if they do not
respond to submitted proposals, he said.
For hotels, Vindow provides a matrix where they can see how
their bids stack up against what competitors can offer, and it can help hotels
determine to which of their thousands of received RFPs would be the most
beneficial to respond.
Pynn said Vindow has had “incredible successes to
date” with its direct relationships, which includes hotel procurement for
both meetings and transient purposes as well as group bookings such as a group
going into California to fight fires for a few months or sports teams traveling
for games. Vindow also is working with TMCs, including
Gant Travel, which provides Vindow to its small and midsize clients for
hotel program management.
Large TMCs, meanwhile, have been “very open” to
partnerships in preliminary discussions, with announcements pending in the
coming months, Pynn said.
In recent weeks, Vindow also announced a new module for
hotels to manage contract renewals on corporate rates, which it developed in
collaboration with Extended Stay America. With the module, hotels can create
customized quotes for customers, monitor and keep up with progress via a
centralized dashboard and view and compare rate history.
Gant in September told The Beat it was hopeful the renewal
tool could cut its annual renewal process down from four months to two.
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