Let’s meet Impala, a firm with roots in London that aims to make connecting to hotel data easier.
In order to standardise everything using a contemporary REST API, the business is building a layer on top of legacy hotel systems.
The partners of DST Global, Stride.VC, Xavier Niel/Kima Ventures, and Jerry Murdock, who are all existing investors, participated in Impala’s recent $11 million Series A fundraising round.
The business has previously raised a seed round of $1.75 million.
Impala’s Goals
Impala initially aimed to be as user-friendly as Stripe, Twilio, or Plaid.
The idea was that any developer should be able to get started with Impala with just a few lines of code before delving further.
Nowadays, in order to connect all the various hotel systems, developers of products used in the hospitality sector must construct a huge number of connections.
Similar work will be done by Impala, and it wants to standardise the API for anyone building services on top of hotel systems.
In other words, you can use the same API query to ask multiple hotels the number of ordinary rooms that are still available.
Handling one or more hotels and developing apps, websites, and internal services that connect to a hotel system become much easier.
Currently, Impala supports eight different systems, but in order to become the hotel industry’s common tongue, general support will be required.
In addition, Impala is developing a direct booking API.
Expedia Group websites including Expedia, Hotels.com, HomeAway, and Trivago as well as Booking Holdings websites like Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, and Kayak currently require manual uploading of reservation data from different hotels.
These channel administrators serve as middlemen who relay information to numerous websites simultaneously.
A Booking API’s Advantages
A direct booking API would make it easier to contact Expedia and other rivals of Booking.com.
It would also create new possibilities for people who don’t often offer hotel rooms right now.
It is reasonable to suppose that an app for a music festival, a conference website, or a city guide website will all allow direct room booking.
It wouldn’t be a Booking.com embed; instead, it would use Impala’s main booking API to make an immediate hotel reservation, resulting in lower commissions.
