Travel Innovator Profile – Inntopia
Christ introduced his agnostic travel switch, which is a platform that provides distribution for long tail products primarily around the ski resort industry. The platform provides access to multiple components and combines a CRS for travel suppliers as well as an out of the box booking engine that is available for local and regional tourism organizations.
Inntopia is working to bring distribution to long tail product and they believe that tours and activities are the next big thing. The big challenge faced by most aggregators is how to pull long tail product together. Christ claims that Inntopia has the largest collection of this type of product. Although Christ claims that they connect with direct systems, there are very few of those systems in the market, so presumably this content exists within the Inntopia platform itself.
T4 Review: Inntopia is the platform used by the agency formerly known as Tourism BC. The switch idea is a good one and is much needed in the fragmented tour and activity market. The challenge for Inntopia will be to find ways to scale content acquisition without have to rely on their own extranet. This inevitably will mean connecting to other reservation systems using via XML.
