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The business revolves around bedbanks contracting hotels and selling them to retailers and aggregators. There are exchanges, there are hybrid models and what no
by mrtksn 5y ago
The business revolves around bedbanks contracting hotels and selling them to retailers and aggregators. There are exchanges, there are hybrid models and what not. That's why "2 rooms left" kind if messages are almost always total BS because every hotel can have more than one bedbank contract or the contract can be flexible and you can't know exactly how many rooms are left but you can query if the number of room you want to book is doable.
At the end of the day, what you have is multiple networks that somewhat overlap and provide API for finding and booking and Web interfaces for the high street retailers etc.
Making an aggregator means, you getting an access to these API and therefore there are many aggregators out there. The problem is, the margins are really tight at that point and you can hardly do anything about it. The money used to be in the high street retail where you can have fat margins and sell extra services like city tours, paragliding - that also have fat margins.
The industry have seen quite a bit of squeeze both because of AirBnB and the aggregators.
A good way to make a lot of money is to contract all the hotels in an area and sell the company to a bedbank like Hotelbeds. Now hotels are opening every day, things change every day so there's quite bit of people on the ground chasing hotels making deals and getting paid handsomely for it.
- clove 5y agoI travel a lot and find that my area rarely has the majority of its hotels listed on sites such as booking.com. What would I have to do, specifically, to get these hotels listed and get paid for it?
- mrtksn 5y agoRight, so you can create a startup that contracts these hotels and sell your contacts to bedbanks like Hotelbeds I guess? I haven't been in touch with the industry since a while, so I can't give you too many specifics advice. A few years back, I remember a startup building a portfolio of Mediterranean(If I recall correctly?) hotels and end up selling the company to a bedbank for 30 Million USD. If you are not looking into making this into a full blown business, I guess you can take a cut as an agent by hooking up the hotels with the representatives of the bedbanks. Look up for people titled "Market manager" and see if you can arrange a deal with them. Market managers are people responsible of adding new hotels to the portfolio of a company and manage the relationship with these hotels, they usually make good money from commissions. It also often involves things like resolving errors with the booking software, teaching the staff how to use the interface etc.
- clove 5y agoI live in Japan and want to give it a shot. Can you give me the step-by-step? Am I supposed to just contact anyone in the hotel industry with a "market manager" title on LinkedIn and tell them I can contact hotels for them?
- mrtksn 5y agoI can't give you a step-by-step as this(collaborating with market managers) is not an actual profession that everyone does but a possibility that you can explore if you like to give it a try. I guess you can message people from linkedIn and see how they feel about it and maybe they can give you more ideas. Maybe you can consider to get in the industry and become a market manager?