Amadeus Targets Blended Travelers With TrustedStays Partnership

Technology company Amadeus has signed a distribution deal with short-term rental aggregator TrustedStays, giving agencies more scope to book a wider range of homes and apartments, including those from Accor’s onefinestay and Marriott Homes & Villas portfolios.

TrustedStays was set up during the pandemic by the UK Short Term Accommodation Association and the UK Apartment Association as a way to offer health workers short-term stays in non-hotel accommodation.

Now it claims it has formed the world’s first connection between the global distribution system and professional short-term property owners, property management companies and the multi-family/build-to-rent industry.

As part of the global deal, TrustedStays will offer an API (application programming interface) connection into Amadeus.

“Amadeus was seeing post-Covid there was more demand from companies to offer more flexible options to employees,” said Merilee Karr, CEO of TrustedStays. That includes more staff combining business trips with vacations.

Amadeus said 20 million more room nights were booked in the first six months of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021, based on its own Demand360 data.

Accreditation Concerns

TrustedStays originally collated a range of operators that together donated $20 million of free stays to National Health Service (NHS) workers, and went on to set up the “NHS Homes” program.

“What we realized was the government wasn’t willing to purchase from us, because they didn’t understand our industry — they thought it was just a bunch of Airbnb-ers, and that there were no standards,” said Karr. “Through the NHS Homes program we were able to educate them that there were a lot of professional homes operators in the market, and that we do have standards.”

Now corporate travel managers will be able to book TrustedStays properties through agencies that use Amadeus, as they have a safety accreditation that involves some sort of physical inspection, rather than a tick-box or self-certified exercise. Initially TrustedStays worked with Quality In Tourism, but it’s in discussion with others including the European European Holiday Home Association.

“Having won the government request for proposal in the UK, we needed to get on to the global distribution system, which for our industry has always been a big challenge,” Karr said.

“With TrustedStays connected to Amadeus, corporate travel bookers can access a greater range of accommodation to offer their employees in the systems they already use,” added Katja Bohnet, vice president hospitality distribution, Amadeus, in a statement. “We value these innovative partnerships that not only support industry recovery but offer our customers more options on top of the over 1 million properties already available within Amadeus.”