What do you think of the following business name: ''Last Room Club'' for a business selling hotel rooms for the same day with significant discount?

It's as good a name as any for something that there's already dozens of out there, and that even hotel operators who deal with them deal with them at all only because they feel like they have to, lack enthusiasm for, and even resent a little. (Actually, I like the name better than many that I've seen for deep discount online travel agencies.)

As names go, worse can be had, I suppose. Most of the ones I can think of for deep discount OTAs aren't suitable for use in polite company.



A few things that drive us nuts:

We don't like dumping our rooms cheap because we can't find a way to rent them for a decent price. If we can afford not to, we won't. I'd rather let a few $140-per-night rooms stand empty than to rent them to people who, if I let them have it for $75 one time, will get spoiled and never again see them as worth more than $75. Letting you sell our $140 a night rooms for fifty bucks, and making it too easy for too many people to get them at that price, doesn't exactly enhance the perceived value of our product — why should anyone want to pay even a hundred bucks a night for something you can get for fifty bucks? And when we have to because we can't afford not to, it makes us sick. If you're just doing it because you need the money, you may be relieved to getthe money, but it still makes you feel like a loser.

What tool can businesses use to negotiate rates for their company at hotels?

Both Priceline and Hotwire have opaque booking capability, if all you're looking to do is book a cheap room from time to time. In order to get the cheap-cheap rates they occasionally have available, you have to take the room they give you, at the hotel they give you. Opaque is what Hotwire is all about, and Priceline still has its 'name your price' feature that's a standby for bad inventory planning on the part of the hotel, or for new hotels trying to assemble a critical mass of customers in a hurry.

When negotiating a corporate or group account with one or more hotels for your company, you need to be thinking 'high-touch', not 'high-tech'. I'm not aware of any software that will do it for you. It's a service, not a product. There's skill and even a little human instinct involved: it can't be reduced to an algorithm that can be processed by a computer.

Is price discrimination good or bad?

Price discrimination is neither good nor bad. Price discrimination, when it occurs, is part of the price: you either pay the price asked of you, negotiate something more favorable if you can, or seek something more favorable elsewhere.

Hotels are a business that, to someone who sees price discrimination as a bad thing, would be among the most persistent offenders; so let's use those as an example.

Why does the price of hotel accommodation increase over time? With time the hotel's owner's mortgage costs him less. Renting his rooms costs him less, so as time goes he shouldn't have to increase his prices. inflation does not compensate for the smaller cost of the mortgage loan . . .

Because I'm greedy and I want every dollar I can get my hands on, and then some.  That all right with you, or you got a problem with it? . . . :-) 



It's just business. People with whom I do business and to whom I have to pay my bills do it to me: people with whom they do business and to whom they have to pay their bills have it done to all of them. Go around to all of them, get most of them to pull it back a notch and go easier on me to a degree that'll make it worth doing, and I'll be happy to sit down and negotiate the same with you.

What is the best hotel strategy to increase occupancy and revenue? How can we differentiate ourselves to compete with other big hotel competitors?

No single 'expert' has an answer to this one that will work for everyone, and any answer I give you will be questioned (along with my 'expertise', and 'qualification' to answer the question), by someone, somewhere. So -- as with any question that calls for me to give you expert advice, I can tell you how I'd go about it, with most any hotel. Parts of it won't work for every hotel. Nor will I pretend to you that I have all the answers.

(I'm assuming here that you have a marketable hotel that does not have a franchise -- or that, if you do have a franchise, you are smart enough to know that your franchise organization does not have all the answers either, which puts you ahead of 95% of the people in this business.)

Here is how I'd go about it:

Why do high-end hotels insist on charging for Wi-Fi service or "resort fees"?

It's sleazy, black-hat marketing. They count on you to pay it rather than kick up a fuss. Often, they will remove the charge if you persist in objecting after they make one attempt to 'explain' it to you (they try that much because some people will, however willingly or grudgingly, come around with an attempt at explanation). It's like that catch on FreeCreditReport.com and similar sites that you don't notice in the fine print, that signs you up in some sort of 'savings club' having a very unclear, if any, purpose, at a $3.00 monthly charge on your credit card bill: a lot of people let it slide, at least for a few months, rather than call them up, wait on hold for twenty minutes, and demand to cancel the 'enrollment'.



One of my own pet peeves in that area is that dollar per night extra charge that gets tacked on to your bill for 'insurance' on the contents of your in-room safe, whether you use the safe or not. Most people don't notice it. Even the contract with the safe supplier provides that the hotel is supposed to take it off if someone complains about it. There may even be a case where an in-room safe was broken into, someone made a claim on that insurance, and the insurance paid off the claim, but I'm not aware of any.

How can I distribute an app-widget for a hotel website? (I have created an app which allows hoteliers to create promotions. These promotions are auctions for hotel rooms day-by-day. The widget functions in the hotel website as a popup window.)

I'd love to have the need for something like that, but usually we have the opposite problem: empty rooms (meaning, for your system, no bidders at all; and the rooms we do rent go for fixed prices higher than a bidder might want to bid), and margins not all that good on the rooms we do rent, once all of our costs are taken into account.

Some hotels might want something like that for, perhaps, six days a year for special events, where the hotel will be fully booked weeks ahead of time. For example, on the local university's homecoming weekend, we know we're going to be full: the only question being, how much can, and should, we charge? (We want to be as profitable as possible, but if I can't get $220 for the $100 room on the big night, I'm willing to at least think about giving it to the guy willing to pay $190. On the other hand, if someone is willing to pay me $275 for it, that person will get it, no matter how many people are willing to pay $220. And there has to be a reserve of at least what we could get for the room at a fixed, what-we-guess-to-be-the-market-rate rate.) I myself have contemplated auctioning special event reservations on eBay to see how it would work out, but have yet to actually try it.

So -- with a little tweaking of what you apparently have in mind -- you might be on to something. Perhaps if you went about it that way . . .