Introducing mapping.travel: A New Hotel Mapping Platform
By Ahmad Ajmi
Today, we're excited to introduce mapping.travel — an open-source hotel mapping platform designed to solve one of the most persistent challenges in travel technology: matching hotel identifiers across different systems.
The Problem We're Solving
Every Online Travel Agency (OTA), metasearch engine, and travel platform faces the same problem: they aggregate hotel inventory from multiple suppliers, each using their own hotel IDs and naming conventions. Without accurate mapping, you end up with:
- Duplicate hotel listings in search results
- Fragmented pricing data
- Inconsistent availability
- Poor user experience
Traditional solutions are either expensive proprietary databases or manual mapping spreadsheets that quickly become outdated.
Our Approach
mapping.travel takes a different approach:
Open Source First
Our core matching engine is fully open source. The travel industry benefits when hotel mapping is a solved problem, not a competitive moat. By open-sourcing our technology, we enable:
- Transparency - See exactly how matches are made
- Customization - Adapt the system to your specific needs
- Community improvement - Benefit from collective enhancements
AI-Powered Matching
We use a two-stage matching algorithm that combines:
- Fast fuzzy retrieval using rapidfuzz and PostgreSQL trigram indexes
- Semantic reranking with BGE-Reranker-Large for contextual understanding
This achieves 92%+ accuracy while processing thousands of hotels per second.
Multiple Integration Options
Whether you're a startup or an enterprise, we have you covered:
- Free API - 1,000 requests/month for small projects
- CSV batch processing - Upload files, download mapped results
- MCP Server - Integrate hotel mapping into AI workflows
- Self-hosted - Run the entire stack on your infrastructure
What's Included
Reference Database
We maintain a continuously updated reference database of hotels with:
- Standardized names and addresses
- Geographic coordinates
- Chain affiliations
- Multiple supplier IDs
Matching API
Simple REST endpoints to match hotel names and retrieve mappings:
curl -X POST https://api.mapping.travel/v1/match \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name": "Hilton Paris Opera", "city": "Paris"}'
Web Interface
A user-friendly dashboard for:
- Testing matches interactively
- Reviewing confidence scores
- Bulk uploading CSV files
- Monitoring API usage
Who Is This For?
mapping.travel is built for:
- OTAs and metasearch engines consolidating multiple suppliers
- Channel managers syncing inventory across platforms
- Data teams cleaning and normalizing hotel content
- Developers building travel applications
Open Source, Sustainable Business
Our code is MIT licensed. Our business model is straightforward:
- Free tier for hobbyists and small projects
- Paid API access for production usage at scale
- Enterprise hosting with SLAs and support
- Custom integrations for specific workflows
We believe open source drives innovation while paid services ensure sustainability.
What's Next
This is just the beginning. Our roadmap includes:
- Support for alternative accommodations (vacation rentals, apartments)
- Multi-language name variations
- Historical mapping data for trend analysis
- Enhanced chain and brand detection
- Community-contributed mappings
Get Started Today
Ready to eliminate duplicate hotels and improve your search results?
- Explore the API documentation
- Try the interactive demo
- View the source code
- Join our Discord community
We're excited to see what you build with mapping.travel.
Questions or feedback? Reach out at hello@mapping.travel or join the conversation in our Discord.