Let’s meet Impala, a London-based startup that desires to make it simpler to associate with hotel data.
The startup is developing a layer on top of legacy hotel systems to normalise everything with a modern REST API.
Impala has recently raised an $11 million Series A funding round, which included Stride.VC, Xavier Niel/Kima Ventures, Jerry Murdock, who are the partners of DST Global and current investors.
The company had earlier raised a $1.75 million seed round.
Impala’s Vision
Initially, Impala wanted to be as easy as Stripe, Twilio or Plaid.
The vision was that with a few lines of code, any developer should be capable of getting started with Impala before sinking deeper.
Developers operating products in the hotel industry presently have to create a ton of integrations to join all the different hotel systems.
Impala wants to do similar work, and normalise the API for anyone creating services on top of hotel systems.
In other words, if you need to know how many regular rooms are left in different hotels, you can ask those hotels utilising the same API call.
It becomes much simpler to handle one or many hotels and create apps, websites and internal services that associate with a hotel system.
It currently holds eight different systems, but general support will be necessary when it comes to making Impala the universal language of the hotel industry.
Impala is additionally working on a direct booking API.
As of now, various hotels manually upload booking data to Booking Holdings websites like Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak including Expedia Group websites like Expedia, Hotels.com, HomeAway, Trivago.
These channel administrators act as middle persons that convey information to many websites at once.
The Benefits of A Booking API
A direct booking API would lessen the barrier to approach Expedia and other Booking competitors.
It would further open up opportunities for new types of players who don’t necessarily sell hotel rooms today.
You can assume being able to book a room straight from a city guide website, a conference website or a music festival app.
It would not be a Booking.com embed; it would leverage Impala’s primary booking API to book instantly with the hotel, which would direct to lessened commissions.
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