HyperGuest & ASA DMC

Angela Shanley Associates (ASA) has spent nearly five decades doing something genuinely hard: hand-picking the best of British, Irish and European hospitality and making it accessible to travel agents and tour operators across more than 60 international markets. That kind of expertise compounds over time. The distribution infrastructure it ran on, however, did not.

With HyperGuest now powering direct API connectivity into ASA's portfolio, the inventory that took decades to curate is finally moving at the speed buyers expect. We spoke with Sigita Puzinaite, VP Commercial at ASA, about what that shift looks like from the inside.

The Vision

‍Nearly five decades in. How do you modernise without losing what makes ASA, ASA?

ASA was founded on the principle that expertise, relationships and genuine knowledge of a destination are what set a great inbound operator apart. That hasn't changed. What has changed is the expectation that those relationships translate into real-time availability, instant confirmation and seamless connectivity, and rightly so. For us, modernising is not about replacing the 'ASA way'; it's about making sure that the quality, curation and trust we're known for are now accessible at the speed the market demands. Our teams still hand-pick every property and negotiate every rate, but technology like HyperGuest means that work now reaches buyers the moment they need it, not days later.

The Challenge

‍What was the gap between what ASA's inventory deserved and how it was actually reaching buyers?

For years, the honest answer was that our inventory was only as accessible as the communication channels we were using (emails, spreadsheets, static rate sheets). For a travel agent in Tokyo or New York booking a Scottish castle stay or a countryside inn in Kerry, that created friction and delay that frankly didn't reflect the quality of what we were selling. We knew our product was strong; the gap was in delivery. When we started looking seriously at API connectivity, it became clear this wasn't a future-proofing exercise, it was already overdue. The industry doesn't wait for anyone. We made sure ASA wouldn't be left behind.

The Partnership

‍Sixty-plus markets, hundreds of properties. What does a live API pipeline actually change?

It changes everything in practical terms. When a buyer in any one of our 60-plus markets searches for availability, they're no longer waiting for us to manually respond, they're looking directly into live inventory, with accurate pricing and instant confirmation. For agents who deal in volume or who operate in time zones far removed from London, that is a genuine commercial advantage. For us, it means we can scale without losing the personal service that defines ASA; the technology handles the transaction, and our people focus on the relationship and the expertise. HyperGuest has essentially given our portfolio the reach it always deserved.

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We would like to thank Sigita Puzinaite and the ASA team for their collaboration and openness throughout this process, and Olivia Pérez Alcalde from HyperGuest for driving the partnership forward.