A small revolution in the Hotel Industry?
October 23, 2009 1 Comment
If you’ve been following the hotel industry news lately you may have noticed the little feud going between Choice Hotels and Expedia. If not, here’s a synopsis. Choice and Expedia couldn’t come to an agreement on the terms and as a result Choice pulled out all of it’s hotels from the Expedia website.
There’s a lot more in this article in Hotels Mag http://www.hotelsmag.com/TalkBack/Comments?article_id=6702984&articleid=ca6702984&talk_back_header_id=6630527
Ask an independent hotel what he thinks about OTAs (Online Travel Agents) and you should be happy if he doesn’t spit at you.
The point is an OTA takes about 25 to 30 percent of the income from a hotel, and once they have done that they demand a certain number of rooms to be allocated to them permanently, whether they fill those rooms or not (at the hotel’s cost) and then they demand that nobody be given better prices than them.
Sound crazy? Well it’s the hotel industry.
Now if you wonder why hotel prices have gone up about 300 percent over the last 15 years then start looking in that direction. Because 30 percent mark-up is a lot!
So back in the end of the 1990s we started making websites for independent hotels to give them a fighting chance on the online world. This worked quite well and hotels have managed to give their direct customers a lower price.
This year we decided to take this one step further, we created lookotel.com it’s all their websites combined into one site where travelers can find better prices and hoteliers can sell without the 30% markup that OTAs demand.
So is a revolution started in the hotel industry? Well, we think it started long time ago but now the chains have realized that it’s gone too far and they are getting on the bandwagon.
It’s only a matter of time before they will need to either change their ways or hotels will find other solutions.
And go check out http://www.lookotel.com, if you’re a hotelier try it out and log your hotel. If you’re a user, book your hotel and compare prices. You could see a difference (if some major OTA hasn’t clamped down on the hotels yet).
Feel free to comment.
About Vincent Ramelli
Back in 2004 when I was an affiliate of hotels.com, now owned by Expedia Inc, I had a feeling something like this might happen one day. Anyway my thought back then was that Online travel suppliers are getting to large and may try to gain full control of the hoteliers rate calculator. And may dominate the travel industry, which is why I teamed up with key players in the industry to develop travel and hotel search & comparison engines, that will help solve a growing problem… I run the Hotelcycle Review and need contributers If your interested drop a direct message to our twitter profile:- http://twitter.com/Hotelcycle – Then I will reply with a sign up link. Thanks! – Anthony