All Roads Led Us Here

We bring to the table a blend of industry expertise and a fresh outside perspective.

"We’re uniquely positioned to redefine hospitality because of our distinct backgrounds and collective experience."

Our team has traversed the martech, travel and financial industries, giving us a unique perspective to tackle hospitality distribution and payment challenges.

Some of us were early programmatic advertising pioneers, automating the buying and selling of online ads, others were busy redefining payments for business, both big and small.

Then you had those who were driving revenue for hotels, helping airlines run or building other travel tech brands.

Our paths have converged to form Katanox to free the hospitality industry from legacy technology and fragmented processes in favor of a fairer, more efficient and more profitable ecosystem.

Our individual journeys have guided us to Katanox. We’re here because no one else can be.

No team has the composition of our unique collective backgrounds, vision and understanding of our own industry and adjacent ones.

Looking At Where Others Were to Understand Where Our Industry is Heading

Thanks to our experience we’re able to see the future of the hospitality industry because of where other industries were a decade or so ago.

First, let’s look at the online advertising world.

In its early days it was naturally just an extension of the offline advertising industry, so you had components like, manual buying and selling of ad space, slow, confusing and opaque processes, too many intermediaries and a high cost of doing business, especially at volume.

Then that all changed with the advent of programmatic advertising (which actually got its inspiration from the financial trading industry), which is in its simplest form, a way to transact media via automated bidding.  

By focusing on its distribution and applying technology to the problem, media buying was opened up and the process was greatly improved for both buyers and suppliers, saving time and money.

It also became easier for buyers and suppliers to establish direct relationships with one another and cut out middlemen.

While this was happening, the eCommerce and financial industries were undergoing their own change.

Whether it be offline or online, merchants struggled to cost effectively, safely and easily accept and process payments for their customers.

In the 2000s, merchants began integrating directly with payment gateways but had to route transactions to a number of different processors built on old technology and they didn't even offer fraud protection.

Then along came new payment solutions that offered an end-to-end solution (including offline and online sales), were easy to set up and charged a fair and transparent commission.

If we zoom in closer to the travel industry, we can even see that airlines are making progress (albeit gradually) in how they distribute and transact their products.

Recently, there’s been a push toward direct distribution and either removing or improving the process of working through intermediaries with initiatives such as IATA’s NDC (New Distribution Capability; effectively what’s meant to be a universal API for the airline industry) and GDS workarounds.

While progress can be debated, at least clear attempts at improvement are being made.

The Future of Hospitality

This brings us to the hospitality industry. While it lags behind these other industries, there is an enormous opportunity to learn from the playbooks of others, and we’re in the early days of capturing this opportunity.

We’re seeing it happen right before our eyes just as we previously did in other industries.

Fortunately, spurred on by necessitated change from the pandemic, hospitality technology has accelerated rapidly in the past three years, leading to increased interest and usage, much like the financial and advertising industries of decades ago.

"What lies ahead is a whole new way to optimize revenue by introducing automated trading of accommodation inventory."

Currently, legacy gatekeepers hold the necessary data needed to unlock this, and are the cause for excessive costs and complexity.

However, direct distribution and partnerships will unlock this valuable information to bring this trading data to the market.

We at Katanox find ourselves at the intersection of these changes and are primed to be the catalysts the hospitality industry needs.

We're helping travel sellers and accommodation providers build direct relationships, so they can control their own data, reduce costs and overall make doing business more efficient and more profitable.

The future is reserved for the entities that can free themselves from the shackles of legacy technology and old processes in favor of true innovation, which will make doing business more seamless and more transparent, while driving down costs and boosting revenue.

We are here to help you realize this future!

This is just a taste of what we're up to. Want to learn more? Drop us a line!