> 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 Are you familiar with SABRE/AMEDEUS? The flight industry did exactly this and it's been a disaster for them. Heck, they even handle hotel bookings as well.
I don't know this domain. Can expand on why is it a disaster for the flight industry ?
Airlines aren't paying 15% commissions to the GDS systems. They pay a few dollars per flight segment.
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…
That's a weird position. Frankly the aggregators provide really low value to the hotel as a stakeholder in the process. They demand concessions and commoditize the hotel itself, which is obviously not in the hotel's interest. This is a classic channel vs direct issue. The only reasons that travel agents and these aggregators exist is that they provided a way to offload inventory or increase demand. Now we have the in…
> Now we have the internet -- so it is easy and cheap for hotels to engage directly with many customers.
It's really not.
> Why should my local Hilton Garden Inn give 20% of the gross to Expedia?
Because Expedia has the traffic to actually sell those hotels. Aggregators "are" the market.
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
My experience has been that you can almost always find decent three star hotels at normal rates for under 125-150% of the GSA published rate. The exceptions tend to be when there's a major event that causes exceptional demand.
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…
sometimes you get kinda suboptimal rooms if you're
booking through an aggregator. They're making less
money off you and they know it
I would expect the opposite. When you book via an aggregator and they provide bad service you can fight back via a bad review. When you book directly you are completely at their mercy.
Example: I just checked the Ritz-Carlton in Berlin. And on booking.com it's clearly stated that Wifi is free. So I would expect I can rely on that. On the Marriot website the hotel, it's written in the small print that you have to pay extra for wifi. So I would expect them to fuck me over and bill some outrageous €25 per day or something for wifi.
“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.
The workaround (which I didn't see explicitly mentioned in the article) is that loyalty rates aren't included in those contracts. That is why the hotel chains are trying to push loyalty account signup and their own websites.
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…
In my experience it is easier to change details of the stay if you book directly with the hotel rather than a third party site, but I could see other benefits outweighing that. Not for me though.
When the "Hilton" hotel is actually a franchisee, aren't the aggregators and the "hotel chain" basically in the same business?
It's structured differently, but you still have a company with a (multi-)national brand presence funneling customers to independently owned hotels in exchange for a cut.
In a future where everyone books through hiltonhonors.com and spgdirect.com instead of booking.com, will the actual hotels make more money, or will the chains just start capturing more of that value for themselves?
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…
That's a weird position. Frankly the aggregators provide really low value to the hotel as a stakeholder in the process. They demand concessions and commoditize the hotel itself, which is obviously not in the hotel's interest. This is a classic channel vs direct issue. The only reasons that travel agents and these aggregators exist is that they provided a way to offload inventory or increase demand. Now we have the in…
It may be easy to engage the hotel directly, but when you are looking at potentially 20-30 hotels in an area the time the customer spends to check directly each one makes the aggregation a huge value proposition. I use booking.com a lot not because they are so good, but because they are more convenient than searching direct. I use to do motorcycle travels with a group and each day or couple of days we target the next place to go. With such a scenario booking hotels directly is impossible, but booking.com gives me everything in an area filtered by some criteria. I use location and rating as the top factors, price is just a differentiator. What is the hotel answer to that?
PS. Most of the time in my experience the booking.com price was better than direct booking. This is because on booking.com I found some great deals (not picking for, but why not use it?) while the hotels don't want to publish such low prices on their sites. I found out a nice place in Austria where we got by accident for a night, the place and the price were so good we extended the stay (for the same great price), then next year in the same period I checked the "regular" price and it was more than double.
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.
On booking.com I take in consideration, in this order: user rating, location and features, pictures, price. The user rating is a hard filter (I don't even look below 8.0), the location is a given, the features and photos depend on the hotel, not the agregator, and are much more than a JSON. For example, no Wi-fi or paid Wi-fi in Europe is a deal killer, not a bonus, while a good food selection and hospitable staff is attractive.
This would reduce the hotel's value proposition to a commodity. It would only work for the most impersonal of hotels, the hotel equivalent of McDonalds, competing on price and standardized features. The kinds of hotel you wouldn't want to stay at, if you had a choice.
I love staying at those hotels. In fact, I wish hotel rooms were commodities that competed on two factors: cleanliness and quietness. Everything else to me is frivolous, as I'm not interested at all in spending any time in a hotel outside of the time it takes me to get ready in the morning and sleep at night.