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For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

foxbusiness.com

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Re: For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

#21

Post by stupidcar »

If hotel chains were managed by sensible, tech-aware people, they wouldn't bother with these expensive, rearguard marketing campaigns. Instead, they'd get together and form an industry working group, and design simple, standard data formats and querying/booking APIs, and then make all their data available through them.

This would make it far easier to build a hotel search engine, which would cause an explosion of competition and innovation in this area. This in turn would undercut the power of the leading agencies, and drive down referral pricing.

But they won't do this. You see the same problem in so many industries. Vendors act like data about their offering is more precious than the offering itself. They make it as hard as possible to build an aggregator, so the aggregation market gets tied up by a tiny handful of players who are willing to invest enough to build a scraping infrastructure. Then they panic that these aggregators have too much gatekeeping power, but rather than encouraging greater competition amongst aggregators, they respond by trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Re: For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

#22

Post by babuskov »

joshvm wrote: post #19
flexie wrote: post #5

It has become ridiculous with these booking sites. When you google a small hotel, often the first many results are hotels.com, bookings.com, tripadvisor.com etc. and the hotel itself is down to spot 3, 4, 5 or even lower. There is a place for the booking sites, especially for exploring several hotels at a time. And they do offer some reviews and comparisons that can be useful. Sometimes, they also offer the cheapest…

Booking.com is an absolutely atrocious website. It's full of very pushy marketing that tries to convince you that every hotel is almost fully booked and the entire world is about to place a reservation. Not to mention the weird push-style notifications. That said, the 24 hour cancellation policy is really useful since some of the listed hotels wouldn't otherwise offer it.

I had a very interesting experience with booking.com. I found a hotel room, it said something like "Only one left". So, I quickly booked and by the time I entered the payment details the room was taken. Ok, so I went back to search for alternative, and it showed the same room again. I tried to book it again, and it simply went through. I actually stayed at that hotel in the end. It looks like some really weird algorithms are at work.

Re: For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

#23

Post by Sacho »

a_humean wrote: post #16
flexie wrote: post #5

It has become ridiculous with these booking sites. When you google a small hotel, often the first many results are hotels.com, bookings.com, tripadvisor.com etc. and the hotel itself is down to spot 3, 4, 5 or even lower. There is a place for the booking sites, especially for exploring several hotels at a time. And they do offer some reviews and comparisons that can be useful. Sometimes, they also offer the cheapest…

I used to work a part time job doing hotel reservations for a small hotel a few years ago. Back then about 35-40% of their bookings were made through booking.com, and although I didn't know the actual cut booking.com took, I know it wasn't small. The hotel was always keen on trying to convert their booking.com or other third party customers into direct customers. We were always instructed, depending upon predicted or…

> I would always recommend that you deal directly with the hotel, especially if you think demand is low. Also, showing up just before the hotel reception closes and swaps to the night shift porters is a great time (10-11pm) as hotel staff are particularly vulnerable to haggling. At that time of night we just want to sell for covering staff wages/fixed costs.

This sounds great for someone interested in haggling, but if I don't want to bother with it(actually, if I'm specifically averse to it as I want to plan my vacation costs in advance), why should I go to the hotel directly instead of using booking.com?

Re: For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

#24

Post by babuskov »

kbart wrote: post #9
flexie wrote: post #5

It has become ridiculous with these booking sites. When you google a small hotel, often the first many results are hotels.com, bookings.com, tripadvisor.com etc. and the hotel itself is down to spot 3, 4, 5 or even lower. There is a place for the booking sites, especially for exploring several hotels at a time. And they do offer some reviews and comparisons that can be useful. Sometimes, they also offer the cheapest…

And it really feels good to pay the hotel that offers the services, instead of some tech company in the US." Most of the times I booked through booking.com it was "cash on arrival", so these sites are nothing more than ads. I think the problem is travel agencies, that book bulk of rooms to rent them later (just a guess, can't read the article itself due to paywall).

> Most of the times I booked through booking.com it was "cash on arrival", so these sites are nothing more than ads.

I can confirm this. I believe the hotels only pay a monthly fee for listing and that's all.

Re: For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

#25

Post by a_humean »

Sacho wrote: post #23
a_humean wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work a part time job doing hotel reservations for a small hotel a few years ago. Back then about 35-40% of their bookings were made through booking.com, and although I didn't know the actual cut booking.com took, I know it wasn't small. The hotel was always keen on trying to convert their booking.com or other third party customers into direct customers. We were always instructed, depending upon predicted or…

> I would always recommend that you deal directly with the hotel, especially if you think demand is low. Also, showing up just before the hotel reception closes and swaps to the night shift porters is a great time (10-11pm) as hotel staff are particularly vulnerable to haggling. At that time of night we just want to sell for covering staff wages/fixed costs. This sounds great for someone interested in haggling, but i…

Even on the phone and sometimes months in advance you can easily haggle a 10-35% discount if demand is low. Especially if you agree to pay in advance on a non-refundable basis. We had price lists updated daily looking ahead 1-2 years.

Re: For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

#26

Post by gt2 »

What is the best priced 3rd party service currently? I use hotels.com because I find it has the lowest price usually, plus you effectively get 10% off since every 10 bookings you receive a credit worth the average of your previous 10 night stays. But I wonder if theres a better booking service out there than this for someone who books a lot of hotels.

Re: For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

#28

Post by git-pull »

These types of news articles about prospects often are driven by an ulterior motive.

When the job market is saturated:

There's a desperate shortage / skill gap of programmers, truckers and pharmacists. Go join this trade school for 16k! The economy is going to hell in a hand basket if we don't churn out 1000 new Javascript programmers every 12 weeks!

When travel agencies want cement their dominance and pour cold water on new competition:

Things are full, really! Don't bother applying Y Combinator as an online travel agency. You're just wasting your time and won't be able to generate any VC or get a single hit to your website! It's futile for... reasons!

Re: For Hotels, There’s No Room Left for Online Travel Agencies

#29

Post by ForHackernews »

stupidcar wrote: post #21

If hotel chains were managed by sensible, tech-aware people, they wouldn't bother with these expensive, rearguard marketing campaigns. Instead, they'd get together and form an industry working group, and design simple, standard data formats and querying/booking APIs, and then make all their data available through them. This would make it far easier to build a hotel search engine, which would cause an explosion of com…

I think that's completely wrong. Very few vendors want their product to be commoditized. From the perspective of a hotelier, reducing their property to a few lines of JSON data is a losing proposition. The result will be the same thing we've seen in the airline industry: a race to the bottom, competing only on price, with ever-crappier service and more nickle-and-dime addons.
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