Dear [name]
Hotels approach Online Travel Agents (commonly known as Booking Engines) with some trepidation. Mainly because they dont like the commissions they charge and really dont like the work involved in maintaining them.
But it helps to think of them as nothing more than a replacement for the good old fashioned Travel Agents that hotels willingly worked with in years gone by. Indeed, many of the current OTA's ARE old Travel Agents who moved their business online to avoid being cut out of the action.
On a recent visit to our partners AxisRooms in India, we were taken to visit a Travel Agents, and were amazed to walk into an office with rows upon rows of Travel Agents waiting to attend to customers face to face. It reminded us of how much the web has changed business now, allowing customers to book directly with a hotel at the click of a mouse.
In 5 very short years we have seen hotels adapt to the web and start to work willingly with more and more OTA's. Most of our customers hovver around 6 OTA's. We will take a risk here and make a prediction;
'Ongoing Technology changes will mean that hotels will soon be working with 100's if not 1000's of Online Travel Agents within 3 – 5 years'
A few hard worked Revenue Managers have just fainted at that thought, but we suspect that in coming years software will be available that will connect a hotels reservation system automatically to 1000's of Online Travel Agents worldwide, there will be no need to laboriously manage Booking Engines one at a time, indeed some systems will claim they already do that.
Anyway with so much emphasis being placed in what is becoming known as Inventory Distribution, we thought it might be useful to update you on a few hints and tips when working with these channels.
A. General - Now could be a very good time to ensure that you have your rates and availability loaded for Christmas AND 2010.
B. RatestoGo - Our understanding is that this channel was at one time a ‘Last Minute Channel displaying room rates and availability for the next 35 days, but this is now changed and they have become more like other OTA's and are selling rooms for the next 365 days.
C. Hotels.com/Expedia - As far as we understand it these two platforms are fed by the same extranet, ie upload rates on one and you will appear on both websites, but more importantly Expedia has purchased an OTA called Venere. Our interpretation of this is that when you sign up to Expedia you may find yourself working on the old Hotels.com Extranet or you might be in the Venere Extranet, which is seemingly simpler, easier to use and lower commissions, BUT of course you will not be displayed on all the hotspots on the hotels.com website (if anyone understands anything different please let us know)
Here is a Press Release
D. We are sure that LateRooms wont mind us saying that they seem to be growing in the market place, one of the reasons could be that they are now the supplier of inventory to easyjet.com
http://hotels.easyjet.com/en/p5655/pvenhp001/wl/Home.aspx
It is also worth mentioning that any rooms uploaded to Laterooms also appears on their sister website http://www.asiarooms.com/
E. Booking.com appear to us to remain the best selling OTA, at least amongst our customers. At some point in the past Booking.com' s owners Priceline purchased an Asian based OTA called Agoda. More recently they have started to feed the inventory from the Booking.com system into Agoda, check it out, if you are working with http://www.booking.com/ you just might find yourself listed on http://www.agoda.com/ too
Here is a Press Release
F. Gulliver have released a couple of new features. One useful one is the ability to reduce room rates according to the duration of the stay, for example the room rate might be 100$ for one night, but then in the extranet you can relatively easily apply a discount of 10% for 3 nights etc. This removes one of the old problems with Booking Engines; that they do not offer a discount for a longer stay as a Reservations Manager might do by telephone.
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