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

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

#71

Post by coldcode »

rorykoehler wrote: post #43
tallanvor wrote: post #33

“There had been this perception that to get the best price, you book through a different channel than going direct,” he said. “That’s never actually been the case.” Yeah, that's a load of crap. I always start with an aggregator, and if I find a place that I like, I check their website as well. Unless they're cheaper or offer some major perks, I book through the 3rd party site. Of the last 5 hotels I've booked, going…

Many hotels have contracts which ensure they can't undercut 3rd party resellers. The trick we used back in the day was to offer the same price on the hotel website while bundling in a bunch of freebees such as wine/dinner etc.

Exactly this. Working at a brand name travel aggregator (sadly now just a brand of someone else) this was always the gotcha for the hotel chain. We get a deal on your certain count of rooms and you can't undercut our price for the same class of rooms. In exchange for 15-30% we send you business. There are kinds of deals possible including us buying rooms from you and then reselling them ourselves (too risky really) or agreeing to buy inventory you haven't sold for today. I don't know the ins and outs of each type of deal, but for smaller hotels its great, for bigger chains its a pain, and for bigger chains with aggressive managers of certain hotels who ignore corporate rules, a tricky gambling act. In the end the price is too high for big chains, but the ease for consumers to compare is great. Same problem with airlines somewhat, they don't want aggregators but the general public wants to compare prices, and to accommodate them the airlines cheat on pricing (low ball the aggregate price and then charge for all sorts of stuff later - i.e. Spirit). With airlines its much harder to compare prices then with hotel rooms.

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

#72

Post by law_of_the_hobo »

rorykoehler wrote: post #43
tallanvor wrote: post #33

“There had been this perception that to get the best price, you book through a different channel than going direct,” he said. “That’s never actually been the case.” Yeah, that's a load of crap. I always start with an aggregator, and if I find a place that I like, I check their website as well. Unless they're cheaper or offer some major perks, I book through the 3rd party site. Of the last 5 hotels I've booked, going…

Many hotels have contracts which ensure they can't undercut 3rd party resellers. The trick we used back in the day was to offer the same price on the hotel website while bundling in a bunch of freebees such as wine/dinner etc.

That explains my recent experience.

I booked for a noticeably (~10%) cheaper price directly through a hotel website, but I wasn't able to get just a room. I had to book a package which included free tickets to a nearby tourist spot.

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

#73

Post by petra »

netcan wrote: post #38
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 can see counterarguments... First, standardization & data sharing across a very decentralized industry is hard. How many industries have something like that? Second, messing around with price & doing complicated, on the fly pricing helps them cut a little extra margin (price differentiation). One price for a regular business customer. Another price for last minute online booking engines. A whopper of a price for th…

So maybe the solution would be to build a decentralized aggregator, where the aggregator send query and user data to each hotel, hotels adds more data, and uses it to send detailed, customized offers. Aggregator assembles page.

And since the job of the aggregator is simple, more competition ?

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

#74

Post by TekMol »

Is it really all just about price? I am rather price insensitive. Usually stay for about $150/night but I don't mind paying up to $300.

But I could never book via anything then booking.com

Without it, how do I know the pros and cons of a hotel? Every hotel site will tell you they are great. But not if they are next to a noisy street, that the staff is unfriendly and that the rooms are much smaller then one would expect from the images.

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

#75

Post by chrisp_dc »

gt2 wrote: post #26

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.

In the last month I've used hotels.com twice because it was lower than booking directly.

In SF: Hotels.come was $180/night, hotel's website was over $300/night.

In Copenhagen: Hotels.com was $120/night, the hotel's website was over $180/night.

I'm not sure why these places are running sales on hotels.com, and not on their direct website. I try not to book on hotels.com because hotels have a reputation for giving those travelers the worst rooms (double beds vs. king bed, next to elevator, unrenovated rooms). However, it's hard to say "no" to 30%+ off.

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

#76

Post by collyw »

babuskov wrote: post #20
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…

> it is just as cheap to call the hotel itself Only if it's in the same country. > book through its website For some hotels, booking via website is often half-baked web app that's full of bugs, doesn't accept certain inputs, etc. Simply because webdev isn't the hotel's main activity. Reviews on the hotel's website are usually non-existent or only positive. I mean, I hate the booking sites as well, but they are often…

International calls (to fixed lines) are not expensive these days.

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

#77

Post by Fomite »

metaphor wrote: post #30

Anyone have insight on where GSA's published per diem rates[1] fair in the gamut of hotel pricing? Seems to be the pre-tax lower bound of decent 2/3 star hotels. [1] https://www.gsa.gov/portal/category/100120

Note that many hotels, including rather nice chains, have much reduced government rates (so do airlines).

Additionally, while I don't know for the GSA, for my state there's a waiver if there's a defensible reason you need to stay at a nicer hotel.

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

#78

Post by douche »

babuskov wrote: post #20
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…

> it is just as cheap to call the hotel itself Only if it's in the same country. > book through its website For some hotels, booking via website is often half-baked web app that's full of bugs, doesn't accept certain inputs, etc. Simply because webdev isn't the hotel's main activity. Reviews on the hotel's website are usually non-existent or only positive. I mean, I hate the booking sites as well, but they are often…

I'm considerably more sketched out at the thought of entering my credit card information on a half-baked local hotel website than going through Priceline or Booking.com. Even some of the bigger hotel chains have a terrifying booking experience - it wasn't all that long ago that I last nooped out of a plain HTTP booking process...

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

#79

Post by pingec »

briandear wrote: post #46

I feel compelled to respond since I am on both sides of the hotel business.. I own a tiny hotel in the Luberon and I also fly about 50k miles per year (staying in hotels along the way.) Booking.com has been amazing for us. They take 15% but it is completely worth it. We don't have "a name" nor do I have time to invest in the relentless SEO content marketing necessary to differentiate us when people search "hotels in…

Booking.com is indeed nice, however, the cut they take is quite substantial (in my country it is 18% including taxes) and I believe there is a lot of room for competition. I see bookings from Airbnb being on the rise. What Airbnb charges me is peanuts compared to Booking.com. Perhaps a Hotel might benefit from the marketing but for me that's not the case as most of our customers are climbers who come to climb in Osp and they book whatever is available next weekend. Also what I don't like about Booking.com is that I can either accept cash in person as payment or accept credit cards through them but not both. I absolutely have to accept cash but why do I have to completely give up the safety net of credit cards and being able to charge no-show penalties.

What software do you use to sync Booking.com and Airbnb bookings calendars? I was using http://www.sync.rentals/ but they seem to have reliability issues (or maybe websites don't like them). Anyways I would love not having to write my own tool for this task and it would save me a lot of time.

Business opportunity for someone?

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

#80

Post by chipotle_coyote »

TekMol wrote: post #74

Is it really all just about price? I am rather price insensitive. Usually stay for about $150/night but I don't mind paying up to $300. But I could never book via anything then booking.com Without it, how do I know the pros and cons of a hotel? Every hotel site will tell you they are great. But not if they are next to a noisy street, that the staff is unfriendly and that the rooms are much smaller then one would expe…

It's not unreasonable to use a site like Booking.com or Hotels.com to get an overview of hotels in an area, then once you've narrowed it down to two or three choices, to go directly to those hotel sites and check prices. Yes, it's going to take you a little more time, but you'll sometimes find better deals, particularly if you're willing to take a few minutes to sign up for a loyalty program or two. Arguably, if you sign up with one of the companies that own a dozen brands or so, like IHG, Hilton or Marriott, you're likely to have a choice of a half-dozen hotels or more that accept that single reward program. And I've noticed friendlier, more responsive customer service as "Watts, [Loyalty Program Name] Member" than as "Watts, Guy who Prepaid on Hotels.com" often enough that I don't think it's my imagination. (And as another commenter mentioned below, sometimes you get kinda suboptimal rooms if you're booking through an aggregator. They're making less money off you and they know it.)
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