Nuitée is the French word for “overnight”, and fittingly it has not taken long for the business-to-business travel technology company, which offers a powerful hotel booking engine, to become a success.

Headquartered in Tullamore, west of Dublin in Co Offaly, the organisation was launched in 2015 and began trading in 2017. Currently, Nuitée Travel’s platform exceeds a quarter of a million searches for hotels every day.

“We operate behind the scenes, connecting travel organisers, travel websites, and airlines with more than half a million hotels across the globe,” says Olivier Dheur, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Nuitée Travel. “We provide accommodation to travel partners such as wholesalers, tour operators, and travel agencies.

“We don’t use off-the-shelf solutions to address market demand. Our in-house research and development team has built a proprietary platform that relies on business intelligence and machine learning, which helps us evolve continuously, and stay ahead of the curve.”

International knowhow

Nuitée Travel has a truly global footprint, with many of its staff – who number 50 and counting – working around the world, including in London, Palma, Casablanca, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Delhi and Dubai. Interestingly, almost a third of bookings (30pc) are made for passengers departing from China.

Mr Dheur, who is one of four members of the organisation’s executive management team who between them boast more than 100 years of experience in the travel industry, says: “Our vision is to merge business intelligence data with expertise, and capitalise on the growing travel market to help customers find the right hotel at the right price, at the right time, across all online distribution channels.

“Our system was built to compete in the first league from the beginning. This allows us to be independent from any source market, because our business is international.”

Nuitée adopts an engineering-first approach, and is built on cloud-based infrastructure, meaning that the system’s capacity can, at the moment, be adjusted to accommodate up to one billion searches a day, each with a processing time of less than two seconds, without disruption.

“[Using the cloud] allows us to scale up our business very rapidly and keep focused on the important thing, which is developing our product and reducing costs,” says Mr Dheur. “Our rates will be unbeatable compared to others, because we have to have very tight margins to cover our operating costs.”

Data-driven ideas

Further, its application programming interface (API) enables clients to create apps to best serve their own customers, and Nuitée’s operating team is available to assist all day, every day.

Med Benmansour, another Nuitée Travel co-founder and its chief operating officer, emphasises the importance of adding value through embracing cutting-edge technology. “Data is at the heart of our business decision process,” he says. “Most players in the industry only focus on transactional data. 

“In our case we do that as well but we go a step further by analysing search data. We try to extract business intelligence, for example showing why a sale was not converted. This is a key differentiator for us. Also we are one of the few players in the industry who reconfirm every single booking with the hotel directly. That is a great service that we provide to our partners. By working with the big players in our industry we push the boundaries of our system.”

Nuitée Travel is always striving to improve and, according to Mr Benmansour, the R&D team uses a “closed-loop feedback system to test new features and optimise performance, whether it is business or technology related”.

Mr Dheur adds that the organisation’s “transparent business model” and “consistent growth through innovation” appeals to new clients and investors alike. And soon its data analytics offering will be able to predict supplier behaviours, such as price changes and the likely availability of rooms. Nuitée Travel looks well set to become much more than an overnight success.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/connecting-for-growth/using-data-to-book-holidays/

Connecting for Growth

We interviewed Olivier Dheur, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Nuitée Travel, as part of the Connecting for Growth campaign, which is putting a spotlight on some of the world’s most promising business ideas. Look out for more insights from top entrepreneurs in the coming weeks.

For more information, visit nuitee.com