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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 webs

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.

coldcode 9y ago
Exactly this. Working at a brand name travel aggregator (sadly now just a brand of someone else) this was always the gotcha for the hotel chain. We get a deal on your certain count of rooms and you can't undercut our price for the same class of rooms. In exchange for 15-30% we send you business. There are kinds of deals possible including us buying rooms from you and then reselling them ourselves (too risky really) or agreeing to buy inventory you haven't sold for today. I don't know the ins and outs of each type of deal, but for smaller hotels its great, for bigger chains its a pain, and for bigger chains with aggressive managers of certain hotels who ignore corporate rules, a tricky gambling act. In the end the price is too high for big chains, but the ease for consumers to compare is great. Same problem with airlines somewhat, they don't want aggregators but the general public wants to compare prices, and to accommodate them the airlines cheat on pricing (low ball the aggregate price and then charge for all sorts of stuff later - i.e. Spirit). With airlines its much harder to compare prices then with hotel rooms.
law_of_the_hobo 9y ago
That explains my recent experience. I booked for a noticeably (~10%) cheaper price directly through a hotel website, but I wasn't able to get just a room. I had to book a package which included free tickets to a nearby tourist spot.
coredog64 9y ago
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.

coldcode 9y ago

Exactly this. Working at a brand name travel aggregator (sadly now just a brand of someone else) this was always the gotcha for the hotel chain. We get a deal on your certain count of rooms and you can't undercut our price for the same class of rooms. In exchange for 15-30% we send you business. There are kinds of deals possible including us buying rooms from you and then reselling them ourselves (too risky really) or agreeing to buy inventory you haven't sold for today. I don't know the ins and outs of each type of deal, but for smaller hotels its great, for bigger chains its a pain, and for bigger chains with aggressive managers of certain hotels who ignore corporate rules, a tricky gambling act. In the end the price is too high for big chains, but the ease for consumers to compare is great. Same problem with airlines somewhat, they don't want aggregators but the general public wants to compare prices, and to accommodate them the airlines cheat on pricing (low ball the aggregate price and then charge for all sorts of stuff later - i.e. Spirit). With airlines its much harder to compare prices then with hotel rooms.

law_of_the_hobo 9y ago

That explains my recent experience. I booked for a noticeably (~10%) cheaper price directly through a hotel website, but I wasn't able to get just a room. I had to book a package which included free tickets to a nearby tourist spot.

coredog64 9y ago

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.