The e-Bridge was created after Neil worked in a travel business in China in the mid 2000’s. It was observed that many local hotels, car and tour operators were not online and even those with online booking engines (OBEs) were not truly online. Fulfilment still required human intervention due to the lack of automation and integration with suppliers.

Customers resorted to instant messaging, phone and fax for reservations. Confirmation of a booking could take up to several days. Payment was also problematic as there were few IBEs that were integrated with payment solutions and reservations systems. Solutions that did exist were very expensive and cost prohibitive for most SMEs. These manual processes behind the scenes often resulted in duplicate or lost bookings.
OTAs filled the gap with allocation management but this created a new problem, properties published the same allocation across multiple OTAs requiring manual monitoring of inventory across all channels 24/7. Although technology is more readily available today, this problem still exists because only 40% of all hotels are online and adoption for other non-air sectors is less than 35%.

A simple solution was required for a suite of products that are integrated and could operate on minimal infrastructure while still providing the competitive features of more expensive enterprise solutions. The solution needed to be portable so it could run in local markets but still be connected to global channel partners and social media.

This is the e-Bridge Travel Technology suite of products.