Rosa Lopez, Business Manager Ecosystem at SiteMinder interviews Patricia Rosselló, CEO and Founder at Roibos, to talk about challenges in 2022 and the company aims to stay differential and highly disruptive.
Patricia Rosselló is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in the tourism sector. In March 2020 she founded Roibos, a highly disruptive and efficient technology company to revolutionise the B2B Intermediation Segment of the Travel Industry
Rosa: Patricia, tell us more about Roibos – What do you do exactly, and how do you differ from other platforms such as OTA’s?
Patricia: Roibos is a B2B distribution marketplace that allows hotels and travel operators to distribute directly without intermediaries. The hotelier loads its prices, and the travel operator gets them directly from the marketplace, which at the end, everyone benefits from lower rates in the market as there are fewer intermediaries involved in the distribution. We are not another bed bank. We are a new way of distribution, just like Amazon has been very successful as a marketplace, we want to be very differential with a new way of distribution directly between hotels and travel operators. Another game changing feature of Roibos is that we work on VCC direct payment to the hotels. Which enables them to charge the VCC before the clients check in and secure the payment of the booking. This is a really good safety net nowadays.
What challenges do you see for your markets in 2022?
The difficulties for 2022 will be to assimilate the restrictions due to COVID. While we are all very excited to travel, and we can’t wait to travel to go on holidays to enjoy ourselves with our friends. We need to still bear in mind all the possible restrictions, especially after the recent news. Consequently, this will mean an even later booking pattern for 2022. Also, we would still see our partners and clients recovering from the economic effects of this pandemic, as many of them reduced teams; we will help them to become more cost efficient by using our platform, since it helps to reduce the contracting and distribution costs.
Can you share with us what Roibos have prioritised for this year and how are these priorities going to impact accommodation providers?
Our bet in growth for Roibos is always to be close to our clients. We listen to them, both hotels and travel operators exactly what they need. We have been able to design a tailor-made answer by giving solutions to both of them. How? We have an excellent team of experienced developers that know the travel business and how to contract and distribute the accommodation, which means they can come up with ideas to develop that directly impact the business of our clients such as specific ways to integrate or ways to get the static data from the hotels. They help to ease the workloads of our clients.
In your opinion, what benefits does our partnership offer to accommodation providers selling on Roibos?
What we offer to SiteMinder and its community is a network of B2B hotel distribution just with one single connection. This multiple connectivity allows hotels to contract a wide range of travel operators with just one mapping and with one single upload. That’s why I think that the flexibility and dynamism of SiteMinder together with the innovation and disruption of Roibos make a good partnership going forward. Our motto is to ease the workload of our clients, there is no need for yearly agreements, extra commissions, less control of the distribution or the collection payment involved in dealing with different partners with different payment terms. With Roibos we make this simple: 1 platform, direct and secured payment, and full control.
Can you give us an insight into any other future plans for Roibos?
Roibos has focused in securing a strong network of Travel Operators (Bedbanks, Tour Operators and OTAs). We currently cover Travel Operators from Latin America, Mexico, USA, Europe, Middle East to Asia Pacific. Our worldwide coverage guarantees a perfect fit for different source markets, different booking leads and stays. We have plans to continue adding agencies to our network which would be able to benefit from rates directly supplied by the accommodation establishment, reduce the chain of intermediaries, its cost involved and helping them to do a more efficient contracting of hotels. All of this while we boost the relationship with the hotels through SiteMinder and together, we provide a seamless solution to integrate all the B2B players into one e-ecosystem.
What do you most look forward to in the next 12 months?
We look for stability, and I guess like everybody else in the travel industry, for some normality. We believe we have a very strong solution. It’s a marketplace which offers efficient solutions to a very digital era post-pandemic. We are a tech solution for the distribution, and we want more partners to experience and distribute their accommodation using Roibos. As we commented, the trend now is to be more cost savvy, wiser in terms of distribution and be vigilante for new business opportunities. We provide all of that.
