And once I exited from Tavisca, you know, being in the same domain, I always had something that, is there an idea that I can build upon? And then, you know, along with my co-founders, we figured out a space wherein we can build some technology which is built for scale, which is efficient, optimized in nature, and which solves a problem for online travel agencies, especially for hotel connectivity. So for hotel connectivity, we started this product and the first problem we wanted to solve was travel agencies when they are looking to distribute or sell hotel inventories online.They want to be able to source the hotel inventories from multiple suppliers and multiple channel managers, GDSs, pet banks.

The idea was very simple that for a travel agency, all of this is a cost. They need to work with multiple supplier partners, integrate all of these, maintain the infrastructure.So we wanted to build something that does all of this for them while their go-to market becomes, go-to market strategy becomes very, very efficient. They just need to integrate with one API. And that's how the ZentrumHub came into existence.

In our first year, we worked in stealth mode and some pilot customers that we knew are struggling with this problem. And slowly we expanded our overall reach. We invested in technology, we invested in marketing, and I'm glad to let you know that now we have got customers all over the world and we are solving this problem for travel agencies all over the globe.

Host: It's totally fascinating how your past experiences have inspired for the foundation of ZentrumHub. So next up, ZentrumHub's API connects over 900,000 global properties. How do you see these APIs reshaping the future of travel, especially for online travel agencies and agents who rely on real-time inventory and pricing?

Abhinav: So APIs are actually already transforming the way travel industry works. Right now, if we see, there are many travel agencies who work with multiple suppliers and global GDSLs, bed banks, to get the API connectivity. And the idea is how they can get connected, the last mile connectivity to hotels, right?

So having an API integration, it definitely helps because you can get real-time inventory by searching. And at the same time, while booking as well, you are doing it via API. So the chances of duplicate bookings or the chances of a booking not going through are very, very low.

In terms of future advancements from API perspective, more and more distribution networks or travel agencies are distributing and sourcing the inventories via the APIs. It comes with multiple benefits. One of the key benefits that I can think of is that there is a space for more and more companies to come and get into this space.

So for example, there can be startups who are focused on a very specific segment, distributing hotels for that specific segment. But since it has become online via the API, that API can essentially be consumed by anyone and everyone. So that way, it is kind of, you know, the overall ecosystem gets more and more democratized.

And this way, it also helps smaller companies to create their own space. Someone in India looking to sell inventories in Maldives and even in some of the destinations which are not frequent visited by Indians, maybe South America. But by working with suppliers who are connected with hotel PMSs and are making their inventory available online via the API, it definitely helps.

And this way they can connect it. So this is one thing. But apart from this, APIs also help a great deal in operational efficiency, right?

Because when you are consuming APIs, you can see what kind of responses you are getting, how quickly you are getting it. And even for optimized distribution, you can decide what kind of APIs you want to integrate. Another use case I can think of with API is the overall efficiency improves, right?

The automation. So for example, when working with multiple suppliers, you want to be able to sell booking without customers getting into hotel and then they're figuring out that the booking is not confirmed. But with APIs, you can get the hotel confirmation number so that you already know that it is confirmed on the hotel.

And then it overall improves the guest experience. Whether you consider refunds, cancellation, everything can be automated via the APIs and it helps a great deal for big travel companies are already doing it. But for smaller travel companies as well, this kind of levels the overall feed.

APIs, using the APIs, you can have granular level of data analytics that can be used to create your own language models or your own personalization or getting the insights, which really improve your overall business offering. So yeah, I mean, overall down the line, I see this becoming, it is already becoming a norm, but with more and more optimizations, the AI coming into the picture, I think it will be, it will be efficient for everyone using TravelTech APIs.

Host: Yeah. So APIs really hold the potential to transform the travel tech. So our next question focuses on AI and personalization itself. So your booking engine uses AI for personalized recommendations. How does this tech improve efficiency for travel agencies compared to traditional methods?

Abhinav: Yeah, definitely. As AI has become more of a norm now, many companies are adopting it because personalization is one of the key aspects in travel. When you are searching for hotel inventory anywhere in the, you talk about booking.com, MakeMyTrip, any of these travel When you are searching, you will realize that most of these OTAs are giving you hotels in a recommendation order. Gone are the days when you see that hotel inventory is getting sorted in order of pricing. It is more about what my guest or what my customer is exactly looking for. And most of the travel agencies are working on these lines only.

So for us, when we started building our hotel API or hotel booking engine solution, one thing we always had in mind that when we want to present the hotel inventory via our API, how we can leverage, we have close to 85 to 90 supplier integrations from where we source the hotel inventories. We have thousands of GBs of data daily processing via our system because of the kind of customers we are working with globally. So the idea has been how we can leverage all this data, the static data that we have got via the suppliers or the dynamic pricing that we get from suppliers and factor in all of that and present the inventory that is recommended for a travel agency.

We do work with our travel agency partners where they also, where we also try to understand what kind of business segment they are operating in. So for example, there would be travel agencies which are very, very focused on corporate travel and they would need inventories which have flexible cancellation policy, for example, or have board basis like breakfast and meal options included in the options. There can be, we work with luxury travel agencies who are presenting only luxury travel options.

So these kinds of factors we do consider and there is a rule configuration that we have built on top of our ML that considers all these various parameters and then presents the most recommended hotels. Not only, you know, adding more onto this, not only in terms of recommendation like what hotels should be shown to your guest user because the whole idea is that how you can minimize the time a user takes, how you can present the options to the user which are relevant and which basically reduces the time for them to identify the right inventory. So that is one problem statement that we look to solve and that is something we have worked upon and improved upon.

But apart from that, you know, having an optimized distribution where, you know, suppliers are, you have like maybe 30-40 suppliers integrated behind the system and you want to be able to leverage all of them. So how to call different suppliers while maintaining the search response output really, really low. AI recommendation engine helps in this particular scenario as well.

So, you know, looking at understanding, it is all about how we understand what the customer is looking for by getting their feedback, understanding how they are currently operating and based on that constantly tweaking how we can present hotels, how we can optimize integration and that is where, you know, our AI recommendation booking engine has helped a great deal to our customers.

Host: Yeah, so AI is the key to personalization which has become a norm in today's commercial setup. So our next question focuses on your suppliers while distributing services to multiple suppliers. So you have reduced hotel search times from 10-15 seconds to 2-3 seconds in past roles. How does ZentrumHub maintain this speed while scaling across over 75 suppliers?

Abhinav: So see, our past experiences, so in the past, I have worked in the travel tech industry. I know exactly how the suppliers work and what are the best practices while integrating these suppliers. So how we reduce the search time, there are two aspects of it.

One is definitely when we talk about the infrastructure or when we talk about how we have built our API. So everything is on cloud, again, which is a norm, but on cloud as well, we are following the latest practices and latest infrastructure which is built for scale without lesser manual intervention. And since we follow a very microservices architecture where each service is scalable on its own, we know exactly what kind of traffic is expected on individual suppliers and the idea is that these individual suppliers can be scaled on their own.

But obviously, as the traffic grows, we have the optimizations in place for that. So one is that. So having a parallel, having a setup of infrastructure where everything is moving in parallel, let's say you are searching and we make a call to the suppliers, it is parallel, it is asynchronous in nature.

So these are some of the best practices we have followed. But on top of that, overall, as we look to improve our offering, we have definitely introduced the AI aspect into it where we definitely focus a lot on the recommended portals or recommended properties for which we initiate separate threads, we initiate a separate connection, get the results really, really fast and have overall optimized our booking engine code, reducing our overhead to less than 500 milliseconds while supporting asynchronous way of working with our suppliers as well as our customers. So this way, we are able to really cut down the performance time and build everything for scale.

Host: Of course, of course, scalability is a must while managing multiple suppliers at a time. Many travel startups struggle with fragmented supplier systems. What were the biggest technical hurdles in building a seamless API, and how did you overcome them?

Abhinav: So this is possibly, you know, the first problem statement that we set out to solve when we started this company. The travel tech, especially in hotel space is quite fragmented in nature. There is no, I would say, universal API spec that everyone adheres to or everyone relies upon.

And every supplier comes up with their own specs to integrate and manage. And obviously, they are also integrating with multiple suppliers. So the whole idea was to have a universal API that takes the pain away from our customers while giving them connection to all the suppliers.

The challenges that we faced in our initial days, I would say, was actually coming up with this universal API spec because different suppliers that we work with support different kinds of functionalities. And it is, we wanted to build something, we wanted to make something which is not particular to any region, not particular to any kind of any specific set of customers, but something which is more generic in nature and which can be extended. So coming up with a universal API scheme that adheres to different kinds of business segments, I think that was definitely a challenge in the initial years.

But once we overcame that, I think since then we have been able to streamline and automate a lot on the API connectivity part, which has helped us to build things at scale and in a very quick turnaround time.

Host: Okay. So overcoming the hurdles is the secret for successful businesses. With data breaches being a concern, how does ZentrumHub ensure secure transactions and compliance with set benchmarks like GDPR while handling millions of bookings?

Abhinav: So definitely when we started our journey, one thing we wanted to make sure was that we follow the best practices as far as the connectivity goes. So anyone looking to connect with our APIs, first of all, we have a secure communication, everything, until your connection is authenticated, you can't really access the APIs. We have put the right practices like rate limiting, so nobody is abusing the system.

And apart from that, in terms of secure transaction, everything is built on the latest security protocol, like TLS 1.2, so that all your communication in transit is secure. And in fact, the data that we store as well, that is also encrypted at rest, following, again, the best practices. In terms of compliance, again, we are following all the right practices for GDPR or CCPA as far as the data protection goes.

And we actually work with third-party auditor companies who do pen testing, who do a vulnerability assessment of your entire cloud infrastructure to make sure that there are no data leakages. Or when you are storing the data, you are following best practices, you have the way for anonymizing the data or deleting the data on request. So these kind of practices we have followed, we have drafted our own policy documents, adhering to the guidelines of GDPR, CCPA and other data protection laws.

But yeah, so it has always been on my mind how to follow these guidelines, because we would be processing data in different continents and different countries. That is how I would put it.

Host: So, it's truly amazing to know that Half ZentrumHub is prioritizing the best security practices and compliance strategies. So our next question is about the future of travel tech. So where do you see hotel APIs and travel tech in the next five years? Will API-driven dynamic pricing and blockchain for secure contracts become the norm?

Abhinav: Right. So I think as we look towards the future, AI is here to stay. I think everyone has kind of established that.

And by virtue of AI, I think more and more personalization and dynamic pricing, which is going to help everyone across the board in the whole travel tech segment, right from the consumer to the hotel and the distributors in between. The dynamic pricing is something which will definitely help because looking at the traditional data, working with large language models, which can operate on scale and give very real-time forecasting to hotels and distributors, I think it will just help them increase their top line, bottom line. We are already seeing a trend of early adopters who are leveraging these technologies to do the dynamic pricing overall.

But I think in the coming three, four years, I definitely see a world where this will become more and more of a norm, just like what we have in terms of API connectivity. The dynamic pricing will be more of a module which is available with everyone. And then it would be more about what kind of regulatory practices are there to make sure that these algorithms and these pricings which are going to be set are fair for everyone.

And this will help everyone, right? Not only the distributors and hotels, but even for the consumers, if we see they will be getting more and more personalized offer, discounted rates, which can really overall propel the travel segment, increase the number of bookings, while not compromising on the experience overall. So definitely one of the key areas that I see this AI-driven pricing coming into picture.

In terms of blockchain, definitely there are multiple use cases like secure transmission of data, including, let's say, your personal details and even, let's say, a hotel is getting confirmed, you want to make sure that it is being honored. So I do see definitely a use case. Currently, it is more of a very, very niche segment that a handful of travel agencies or distributors or companies are operating in.

And I foresee that it will be a niche, it is just that how quickly the travel segment is going to adapt to how blockchain operates and how it brings value to everyone, again, in the ecosystem. I think it will just depend on that, the sooner we see a use case, which is really bringing value while the cost is really low, I think that will help with the adoption of blockchain.

Host: So we can expect some exciting times ahead in the travel tech.

Abhinav: Yeah.

Host: And for demystifying the world of travel tech and APIs as well as AI today with us, the insights you have shared are truly valuable for us.

Abhinav: Thank you so much. It was great interacting with you. And I'm glad that I was able to share some of the insights or input that I have. Really, really good to be on your show.

Host: Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in to this episode of ExtraMile by KnowledgeNile. I'm your host, Rittika, signing off for today. Stay tuned for more insightful interviews with industry leaders.

Till then, stay tuned.