Tripbam, the auditing, benchmarking, analytics and sourcing provider for hotel and air, announced the next version of Smart Sourcing. The newest iteration of the hotel request for proposal tool was developed in cooperation with global sales organizations at major hotel chains, including Marriott International, Hyatt Hotels Corp. and Accor. Tripbam first launched Smart Sourcing as a standalone product for corporate travel buyers in 2020 after developing the offering with existing clients. One of the unique capabilities of Smart Sourcing, according to the announcement, is that it allows travel buyers to send bids directly to hotel properties to create a more efficient sourcing process. With this release, in collaboration with the named global hotel chains, Tripbam has created an optional functionality to allow for national account managers to review and manage the process on behalf of chain properties. David Mollov, executive vice president of hotel solutions, said that when the company first launched Smart Sourcing, it solved a major resourcing issue of COVID-19 by allowing buyers to send property-level RFPs while account managers were furloughed. Now, he said, with the cooperation and feedback of Marriott, Hyatt and Accor, “we’re able to deliver even greater flexibility for buyers to source in the most efficient way possible and capture quantifiable savings unlike more traditional processes.”