online travel agency
Digital Trends in Accommodation: Hotels, Booking.com and DMA
HOTREC | July 8, 2024
The European hotel industry has long been warning of unfair business practices from OTAs. Competition and collaboration are crucial for the hospitality sector, but create challenges that impact prices, operations, and guest experiences. As the largest OTA, Booking.com is now a gatekeeper platform under the DMA. The dominant platform will finally have to comply to the new digital rules. This should allow hotels to offer better prices on their own distribution channels. The results of our 2024 Hotel Distribution Study confirm the need for new digital rules that will ensure fair competition in the hotel accommodation sector. The findings...
A Hotel Guide for Avoiding OTA Panic and Rate Parity Games
Vikram Singh | January 24, 2023
By Vikram Singh OTAs are a fact of life in our industry. But there are so many negative feelings about them, constantly being stoked by hotel media, that it becomes difficult for hotels to form calm, cohesive OTA and rate-setting strategies. OTA-bashing articles surface every few months, no matter what cycle the travel business is in. These articles usually involve screenshots of OTA rates being lower than the hotel’s direct rates, leading to complete disgust and a ton of hate reading. Other times, these feelings of fear and loathing towards OTAs are triggered at conferences by speakers going for some cheap applause. I would like t...
Google Represents Ongoing Threat to Online Travel Agencies, Says GlobalData
GlobalData | January 13, 2022
COVID-19 had a serious impact on online travel agencies (OTAs), according to GlobalData, which notes that the OTA market value decreased by a gruesome 60.4% year-on-year (YoY) in 2020. The leading data and analytics company reveals that this strain has amplified OTA’s existing concerns around the growing presence of Google in the market, and how the tech giant’s control could impact competitivity and, therefore, consumer choice. Ralph Hollister, Travel and Tourism Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “Google’s growing presence in online travel will be ominous for OTAs that have no choice but to rely on the search engine fo...
Maximizing Your Relationship With OTAs
Tim Lee | January 13, 2020
By Tim Lee The relationship between hotels (particularly major international brands) and Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) may sometimes seem an uneasy alliance. Major hotel companies, such as Hilton, Marriott and IHG, are adding policies on price match guarantees to encourage direct bookings and detract from the perceived value of OTAs. Meanwhile, OTAs push even harder for competitive pricing and invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to increase their market share. Due to acquisitions and mergers over the last two decades, most OTA brands are a part of, or work with the two largest players in the space: Bo...
Amazon’s Influence on Online Travel Agencies
HEBS Digital | March 14, 2018
By Max Starkov Background: A recent analysis of Amazon's ability to disrupt online travel agencies by Morgan Stanley was recently in the news with a number of opinion articles on the subject being published. "Online travel has proven immune to Amazon disruption so far. But as we have seen with other categories, that doesn't mean Amazon won't try again, and they should. Amazon's focus on selection/service, pricing, and frictionless payment that drive conversion and stronger user economics also translate directly to travel," said analyst Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley. Many hospitality industry experts chimed on the subject, with opinion...
Klobuchar Urges Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to Investigate Potential Existence of Deceptive Conduct by Online Travel Agencies
November 7, 2017
While the large online travel agencies serve an important role in promoting consumer choice and competition for hotel and airline bookings, their size and market influence may allow them to engage in practices that could be detrimental to consumer welfare In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim and Federal Trade Commission Acting Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen, Klobuchar calls on the agencies to examine the extent to which these websites may be engaging in misleading or anticompetitive conduct, affecting the prices and levels of service available to American consumers WASHINGTON, DC — U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the R...
Tambourine Shares We’re Using the Wrong Message to Fight OTAs
Tambourine | October 10, 2017
Looks like we might have been going about this all wrong. The thought that a guest's primary travel concern is saving money is an assumption that needs to be reexamined. According to JD Power & Associates' North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study, guests are more likely to be dissatisfied with their hotel experience and come across more problems (like canceled reservations or last-minute changes) if they book through a third-party, such as Travelocity or Expedia. So, what does this mean for you? It's time to change the overarching hotel industry strategy from emphasizing price parity to tapping into consumer fears of OTAs....
Are OTA Bookers Destined to Stay Fewer Nights?
Ryan Solutions | November 17, 2015
Last week we found that non-OTA bookers make their resort reservations 61% further in advance than guests who used OTAs. But lets dig deeper and add length-of-stay into the mix. Do resort guests (typically more leisure than business) who used OTAs stay fewer nights? Or if they stayed the same number of nights, did they really wait longer to book? Here's what we found. The Goods With this analysis we wanted to address two schools of thought. The first is that a traveler is driven by the window of time they have to travel. In other words, their length-of-stay is fixed and the rest revolves around that. So we began by grouping guests by th...
