Peakwork, a Düsseldorf-based travel technology company that builds distribution tools, has been expanding beyond its home region of Europe.
In the past half-year, the 200-person company opened its first office in the Americas — in Cambridge, Mass. — and its first office in Asia-Pacific — in Singapore.
Since its founding seven years ago, the company has attracted famous-name travel clients (mostly catering to leisure travel), such as Google, which taps its services to help implement its hotel metasearch, and Lufthansa, which has hired it to help implement its direct booking effort.
Google, Kayak, TripAdvisor, and Trivago are live with advertisers on its platforms across 15 countries for hotels and flights for shopping and booking.
Peakwork creates distribution software that it licenses out to the travel value chain. It connects supply — from dozens of airlines, package suppliers, hotels, bedbanks, global distribution systems (GDSs), and other sources — with distributors, including tour companies (such as TUI), online travel companies (like Trivago), networks (like Expedia Affiliate Network), tours-and-activities platforms (such as Get Your Guide), and other distributors.
Peakwork takes a decentralized network approach, where the responsibility for data quality, accuracy, and production is on the supplier. It uses high-performance caches, in targeted, small-batch pulls, from what is essentially a complete mirror of the supplier’s inventory system. Unlike GDSs, it has no look-to-book ratios or polling cost business models.
The use of caches lets a supplier cope with surges in traffic. The day layer in-between protects the core APIs from being hit directly. That’s of particular appeal in Asia, where many suppliers would like to hook up to online travel agency funnels like CTrip but whose APIs struggle to handle the spikes in traffic using their existing integrations.
Cached data has an industry reputation for inaccuracy, but Peakwork claims better than 96 percent accuracy.
Read rest of the article at: Tnooz
