Why doesn’t Agoda/Priceline offer any rewards? I have stayed at least 500 nights at hotels using them and have never got a free night anywhere or any other thing.

You have your reward. You book on Agoda or Priceline or any other online travel agency, you content yourself with what they give you. If all you want is a big discount, that’s what you get, but I don’t see any loyalty programs or rewards offered by the OTAs in your future. (All the more so since nearly all of the larger ones are owned by one of two companies, and they don’t really have to compete for your ‘loyalty’)

If you want a loyalty or a reward program, book directly with the property or directly with the brand.

Try that and see how it works out for you. Most chains have a ‘lowest price guarantee’ on online bookings, and nearly all agreements with OTAs require the hotel to offer the ‘lowest publicly available rate’. Taking out a rewards or a Returns or a Honors or a Choice Privileges card might give you access to ‘not publicly available’ rates, and you can frequently negotiate something at hotels that you use on a regular, recurring basis. So, you’re not really saving any money.

And you get your points.

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Originally appeared on Quora

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 . . .