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It could make sense because you are at constant risk of deplatforming and having a second provider is a backup plan. Unfortunately it's really rare to be able t
by Lucadg 7y ago
It could make sense because you are at constant risk of deplatforming and having a second provider is a backup plan.
Unfortunately it's really rare to be able to get bookings from two platforms in a balanced way.
I'm still trying to understand why. Any ideas?
- madaxe_again 7y agoChannel imbalance is inevitable without conscious and active management to prevent it. I used to run an ecommerce platform, and saw the innards of a lot of merchants. In a nutshell, a winning channel will see snowballing resource investment, and a losing one will be starved. You can force parity, but it usually comes at the cost of overall volume. Boils down to risk mgmt vs revenue - and all but the most conservative businesses will choose revenue. In my case, I absolutely starved booking in favour of Airbnb, as Airbnb was much faster out of the gate. So, I have platform risk, but revenue is good.
- Lucadg 7y agoHow did you starve Booking? Didn'it just happen? My point is that in this market it's really hard to attain channel balance. It seems the OTAs alghoritms absolutely favour cannibalization.
- madaxe_again 7y agoI didn’t actively manage pricing, which I do on Airbnb - and had to charge a lot more on booking for the same revenue, as their commissions are fairly astronomical, if you want to feature anywhere other than the last page of search.