31–40 of 47 posts
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Why on earth would you want to sell out all rooms as a goal?
I must be missing something here. How does an empty room make any money?
The article does not mention the potential impact of Roomkey: http://www.roomkey.com/ Based on the articles that the CTO of Roomkey has written, I am under the impression that their technology is very cutting edge: http://www.colinsteele.org/post/27929539434/60-000-growth-in... http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grai... It is important to note that the big hotel chains had realized that they had…
On the downside, you have to believe in the "best rate guarantee" and at our startup we simply don't see that playing out. When we go out and search rates across all of the OTAs and secondary channels (distributors, wholesalers, etc.), we find a significant amount of price disparity in the market so those who don't shop multiple sources will invariably pay more for their hotel room.
I realise this isn't quite your area but I'd really love to know how far in practice hotel managers take the idea that "a room with guests paying anything is better than an empty room". Do they typically offer significant discounts to bring in last minute guests? How does this works in practice? I suspect there's a whole lot more to it and it's probably quite a delicate balance between capacity maximisation and less…
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Also there's a consumer-perception / branding effect going on with too-cheap pricing too. If I know I can call the local Four Seasons at the last minute and get a room for $75 then I'm going to be much less willing to pay $500 the next time - even if I "know" I got a special deal ("Well can't you make me a special deal again?"). That's where services like HotelTonight make the properties very happy - they fill the ro…
The trade-off is supposed to be that you can't always get a last-minute room at the Four Seasons when you book it for "tonight" -- sometimes they'll be sufficiently full that they won't have sold that block to HotelTonight, and instead of having a plush room right across the street from where you'll be working early the next morning, you'll need to settle for a "motel" right on the highway, 10 miles away. I'm not sur…
Sounds like this would be a great market for a company like Hipmunk, Adioso, or Square to develop an app targeted at indie hotels. If I'm Hipmunk and I'm running into the sort of issues described in this post (people w/o computers using fax machines to manage reservations and making me look bad when I misquote a customer because of it), I build a best of breed tablet app that electronically keeps track of all the com…
Many of these hoteliers are running a lifestyle, not financial or business, context. Invest in new systems (and learning new systems)? Not worth the hassle. I even stayed with one hotel (7 rooms) - their problem with OTAs was being sent too many customers. They rarely wanted to be full, and they also hated 1 occupancy nights.
This is a pretty good read. I REALLY hate booking both air travel and hotel rooms as I ALWAYS get the feeling that I'm getting fucked. It always just feels like I know someone is getting the same room on the same night or the same flight for cheaper than me. I never feel like I've won, so to speak. When booking air travel, if I can, I like to book with Southwest just because it feels better. I may be able to get a ch…
You would rather everyone at your hotel pay the same price, which is higher than most people at the hotel next door?
You have to understand that people are, despite economics, not rational maximizers.
Most people would rather have a fair deal than a better deal - for example, if you offer to split "found money": split $100 with someone 90/10, they will probably turn it down, whereas if you offer to split $10 50/50, they'll probably say yes.
It sounds like we are doing the right things in terms of implementation (providing api endpoints for bulk data and more fine grained api endpoints for real time availability) and ideally providing a new revenue stream to OTAs and others who are interested in a not yet cut throat margin business.
Hotel yield management is about a decade or so behind the airlines, but they're catching up, so this is probably going to get a bit harder from the OTA's/customer's perspectives before it gets easier. (Yield management means the art/science of room pricing such that you sell out nearly all of your inventory while maximizing profits. It has gotten radically more sophisticated over the years -- loyalty programs, for ex…
yield management is the exercise you do when your - the individual hotel's - distribution system is set up perfectly and humming along. The biggest gains for hotels happen actually when they set their mind to it that they want to shift the source of their business away from the OTAs to more direct business: direct can be the online booking tool on their own hotel website, mails, repeat customers, phone calls. yes eve…
Here are two examples of clients that are accepting credit card info over plain HTTP: http://vox-hotels.com/ http://www.sonnseit.at/
We are integrated with 20+ OTA in different ways, although 90% are pull systems, they call us for data, with the Open Travel Alliance protocol (OTA again), and it is a complex system (which it is not bad).
Maybe I can answer doubts you have :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yield management is the exercise you do when your - the individual hotel's - distribution system is set up perfectly and humming along. The biggest gains for hotels happen actually when they set their mind to it that they want to shift the source of their business away from the OTAs to more direct business: direct can be the online booking tool on their own hotel website, mails, repeat customers, phone calls. yes eve…
Just a heads up, you and your clients are taking credit card information over unencrypted HTTP. Here are two examples of clients that are accepting credit card info over plain HTTP: http://vox-hotels.com/ http://www.sonnseit.at/