Back in 2003-2004, the hotel industry implemented “next generation seamless” (NGS) connectivity, primarily to solve a rate accuracy problem.
NGS means that every hotel availability request is sent directly to the supplier system for a response and the hotel systems do not have to update the GDS database with their rates and availability anymore.
At the time, I had lobbied, within Amadeus (where I was working), to solve this problem in a different way. My fear was that the GDS and Amadeus in particular, were losing an invaluable database with rates and avail for about 60K+ (now many more) hotels.
Read the full story at:http://www.tnooz.com/2011/01/03/news/why-the-airline-online-travel-agency-war-will-not-evolve-to-hit-hotels/