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HOTELS are aggressively campaigning to encourage more guests to book directly with them and to move away from online booking sites or travel agencies.
Hyatt Hotels Corp, Marriott International and Starwood Hotels & Resort Worldwide have launched campaigns to offer discounts as high as 10 percent if bookings are made directly through the hotel website or app.
For a long time, visitors have been heavily dependent on online booking sites such as Expedia and Agoda for the lowest hotel rates.
However, the relationship between hotels and online travel agencies (OTA) has been contentious due to the fact that hotels are resentful of the high commission that the agencies often charge, oftentimes 15 percent or higher.
This has prompted large hotel chains to push back against OTAs by offering discounts to guests booking directly with them.
The discounts complement other benefits hotels may offer, including program points, online check-in, express check-out and mobile reservation management.
Based on a report on Skift, Expedia has hit back against hotel chains by laying out a conservative estimate on how hotel owners would be taking a revenue hit of around eight percent because of chains’ decisions to offer guests lower rates than the enlisted prices on OTAs.
Expedia argues that despite hotel property owners saving on distribution costs from direct bookings, they would suffer from reduced exposure and well as lost traffic from OTA’s billboard effect.
The American Society of Travel Agents said that forcing agents to book directly on hotel websites “makes comparative shopping harder than agents and consumers alike, and adds to an agent’s workload by disrupting the standard booking process.”
Source: travelwireasia.com