Skift Take
Hotel booking and trip planning websites are finding a new revenue outlet in offering their APIs to startups, but in some cases the move to take their software from consumer facing to B2B marks a lack of pickup among customers.
DealAngel, the site that lets you search for hotels and compare prices based on their historic and broader market value to ensure you really are getting a good deal, has launched a private beta of its API — essentially adding a B2B element to its otherwise consumer-facing offering. It’s a move that makes quite a bit of sense, too, potentially opening up DealAngel’s data to additional use-cases and giving the startup an alternative revenue stream. The API should go fully public by April, while Social trip planner Gogobot is the first to add such integration.
The newly-released API, which will be offered on a tiered pricing model based on usage, lets other sites build DealAngel’s technology into their own wares. It doesn’t, however, provide real-time pricing — it’s presumed that travel sites and other prospective users of the API will already have this type of data via their own suppliers — but focuses purely on the additional market intelligence aspect so that they can easily spot a good deal from a rip-off.
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Tags: hotel deals, otas