It's not every day you see words "enlightenment" and "East London" in the same sentence, so a pleasure to discover something completely new yesterday at World Travel Market in the capital's ExCel.
I do not feel such a technological luddite for not knowing about this nugget beforehand, after learning that the vast majority of agents and intermediaries using a GDS are also completely in the dark.
So, anyway, how many people know that a technology firm exclusively sells placement for hotels on GDS results across Galileo, Worldspan, Amadeus and Sabre?
The system - known as Preferred Placement - works by allowing hotels to appear at the top of search results for city accommodation.
There is no marker to indicate that the results are paid-for. The company also sells a line or two of free text for other hotels within all search results.
The company says that around 20% of the 15,000 or so hotels it has on its system are currently using the Preferred Placement service.
This means, for example, a search for Glasgow hotels in Scotland will throw up around ten or so paid-for properties on all GDS results, ahead of the dozens of others in the city.
[I saw a live search on Sabre]
The company's international president was obviously talking up the product when he spoke to me yesterday morning.
But data is data. A performance report I was shown for a very well known hotel in Manchester showed searches converted at 12% when it is in the Preferred Placement programme, against an average of 1% when it is not. The UK average is actually 15%.
I'm not going to name the company for fear of being accused of giving them free publicity.
[It should be pretty easy to work out]
So what are the questions arising from this:
* Should hotels ensure they divert some marketing spend into Preferred Placement? [The boss told me on average most hotels put around 1% of their marketing spend into the programme]
* Should intermediaries be made aware of the fact that the top listings on the GDSs are paid-for?
* A rather incredible aspect to all this is that the company had managed to get the Preferred Placement system to run across all four GDSs exclusively, as mentioned previously. So should the GDSs be operating a system such as this with only one organisation? In theory, some would argue that hotels have no choice in terms of supplier and therefore competition might be stifled?
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