Technology

Pesapal joins Oracle to market Kenyan hotels on digital platforms

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A lady booking flight online. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH

Payment solutions provider, Pesapal has joined the global IT giant, Oracle, to market Kenya’s tourism facilities.

Pesapal , which has 4,000 hotels from Kenya and across Africa on its Reserveport platform, has integrated with Oracle Partner Network (OPN) allowing tourists to locate, book and pay for reservations for any hotel.

Pesapal chief executive Mark Mwongela said achieving Oracle validation gives tourists a one-stop platform to plan their Safari, thereby reducing costs usually consumed by travel operators, agents and other people involved in searching for required partner hotels.

“Kenya has expertise to power technological solutions that facilitate hotel business deals,” he said.

Oracle Worldwide ISV Cloud Business Development vice president David Hicks said customers now have confidence using the Reserveport 2.6 portal that will ride on the Oracle Hospitality OPERA 5.5 platform that boasts of 35 years’ experience in providing technological solutions to food and beverage operators.

“For solutions deployed on premises, in the cloud, or both, Oracle Validated Integration applies a rigorous technical review and test process that helps to reduce deployment risk and improves the user experience of the partner’s integrated offering,” said VP Hicks.

The development addresses Covid-19 concerns reducing interactions between tourists, travel and tour operators while directly searching for tour destination and placing reservations for reception, transport and hotel services from one portal from anywhere in the world.

Covid-19 has hit the hospitality sector hard after social distancing measures and travel restrictions were imposed by governments across the world.

The development has also seen hotels embrace use of digital platforms for bookings via own websites and through online travel agents. Restaurants now allow placing of orders through online food order and delivery platforms.

Reserveport integration to Oracle Hospitality OPERA provides realtime availability and pricing of hotel rooms and services sold in one marketplace that online travel agents, among them Booking.com, Expedia and Hotels.com use to place orders for their clients.

This takes away the need for calls, paperwork calls and involvement of a long chain of people in travel agent offices, travel operators and banks in favour of a one-stop shop solution.

Kenya’s Pesapal is a payment gateway enabling customers use their credit cards, banks and mobile networks to settle hotel bookings and related services from one portal.