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.

Expedia Group - Wikipedia

Booking Holdings - Wikipedia

Originally appeared on Quora

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.

Would you recommend using Hotels.com to book a hotel room? Why or why not?

Never. Call the hotel directly and you can get a better deal.

Online travel agencies charge a commission of 20–25% of the amount you pay. So if you call me, I’d give you a better rate, and still come out better than the net payable to the hotel if you were to call them.



Or call any hotel and do the same trick. AAA and AARP are not ‘publicly available rates’, and while you should be a member, many hotels don’t question it if you ask for them. That gets you ten percent off what you’d pay on most OTA sites, unless they’re handing out deep discounts like candy.

If the hotel agreed to one of those, they deserve exactly what they get.

Originally appeared on Quora

Does Expedia match booking.com commission rates for when you guest pays at hotel?

Booking.com charges a flat 20% commission. Expedia is slightly higher, closer to 24 or 25%, and that varies by property. I think chains negotiate it in a lot of cases.

I don't suspect any collusion between the two, or attempt by either of them to get or keep their commission rates in any way in alignment with those of the other.



I've heard of the existence of some GDS channels who in negotiating with a hotel, will tell them, we want, say, $2,000 in commissions per year guaranteed, and paid to us up front before we even list your property. I've never had one try it with me, but the first time it happens, I'm going to tell somebody to pound sand. I ran a used bookstore and coffee shop years ago, dealt one time with a wholesale vendor that demanded 'minimum orders', quickly discovered Costco; and concluded that only a real wuss, an enabler, a codependent, a cherry having less than reasonable adult human resolve who's probably in at least one other abusive relationship, would even talk to such vendors rather than just hang up on them.

Hotwire operates on a different model altogether that isn't commission-based. They're more like a reseller. You make a certain number of rooms on each night, of various types, available to them at a lowball set price, and they resell them for whatever they can get -- which is usually at a markup -- then turn around and pay you the agreed-upon price as they pass the reservations along to you and the guests show up to check in.

Online travel agencies have been in existence as long as they have, are as lucrative to their stockholders as they are, and get away with what they do in terms of exorbitant commissions; because they discovered revenue management some time before the hotels themselves did. We were attached for far and away too long to assigning a 'shelf price' to our rooms, and too inflexibly sticking to it except for corporate and group rates negotiated by the individual hotel.

Originally appeared on Quora

Should hotels and accommodation providers get together to create their own booking portal?

Like Room Key? It’s been done already, and it’s a failure.

Room Key was launched by a consortium of hotel chains who wanted to light off a collective response to, and re-capture guest referrals from, online travel agencies like Expedia and Travelocity.

Only one teeny-weeny problem: the OTAs were already filling the demand for hotel room bookings via online travel agencies. Customers wanted to compare rates, and hotel features, at their destination side by side, and the online travel agencies were enabling that, and had first mover advantage, and the customers didn’t need Room Key in order to do it.

What is and why do hotels have a rack rate?

Sometimes, with all these 'entitlement' discounts, I wonder myself . . .

First of all, rack rate is not - at least not in the US - set by law. If some hotel clerk told you that, he or she either didn't like you, or just didn't want to give you any kind of discount. Every hotel sets its own rates - and its own exceptions to and discounts from those rates.

(Some localities require the hotel to post their rates, like on the inside of the door to your room, usually a scheme to thwart price gouging, or fraud by clerks. Where there is such a requirement, you'll see an astronomically high rate posted, in anticipation of the expected rate for the most high-demand special event in the area . . .)

Rack rate is the asking price for a room, the set price from which nearly all discounts are calculated.

How much? Well, certainly I want to cover my costs, make a profit, etc. - but it is strictly market driven. (Consider Hampton Inns, or Courtyard by Marriott. A room at a Hampton Inn, or a Courtyard, is going to come pretty much one way. But a king room at a Hampton Inn in one city can be priced very differently from a similar king room at a Hampton Inn in another, depending upon the local market. The same goes for Courtyard, and any chain that emphasizes product consistency and uniformity.) I'm going to set it at an amount comparable hotels are asking for comparable rooms. Set it lower, and I'm charging less than the guest might be willing to pay; set it higher, and unless my property has amenities and features for which the guest considers worth paying a little more, I'm going to lose business to the competing hotels.

And now, the discounts . . . You can pretty much figure that everyone who walks in the door has some rationale why he or she should receive a 10% discount from the rack rate.

How do online travel agencies offer such low hotel prices?

They don't. We do. It comes out of our hide. Online travel agencies charge high commissions to the hotels.

Booking.com charges 20%. Hotels.com, Travelocity, Expedia, Priceline and others charge between 22 and 25%. And that's if you have a franchise affiliation and let your franchise organization negotiate it for you.

And those are the ones where you -- the consumer -- don't get that much of a bargain. A contract between a hotel and an online travel agency provides for 'rate parity': each OTA wants a promise from the hotel that the rate provided to it is the lowest publicly available rate, and provides stiff penalties to the hotel if a lower rate is found elsewhere. Likewise, every franchise organization offers some version of a 'Best Internet Rate Guarantee', and holds their franchisees to it. (I should have listened to my dad and made it my goal to go to Duke Law when I was a kid: I smell a lucrative opportunity here for a mass tort lawyer to file a class action suit on antitrust and price fixing claims . . .). Since the 'lowest publicly available rate'/'Best Internet Rate' can only be one number, and that number can't be any lower and still be either the 'lowest publicly available rate'/'Best Internet Rate' ; what you pay on any of those websites is going to be very close to the hotel's 'Best Available Rate', the rack rate (see Michael Forrest Jones' answer to What is and why do hotels have a rack rate? )

What reasons are there for a hotel to say that they don't have any rooms available, but a third party on behalf of the hotel does?

Not all property management systems work with online travel agencies, so what you'll frequently see is a certain number of rooms allocated to the OTA - that way, the hotel doesn't end up getting overbooked.



If it was a Choice-franchised hotel, Choice and Booking.com are well-known to not play and get along well together: Booking.com and Choice's proprietary front desk and reservations system don't interface or communicate one another: the hotel gets its Booking.com reservations via fax, and when you've sold the last room to a walk-in guest or in-house reservation, you'd better get on to Booking.com and tell them in a hurry, or else something very bad could happen.

In either event, what I'd do if I were cutting it close with available rooms is block as many as I had allocated to Booking.com (in which case, we wouldn't have any rooms available when you called us, but you could book one on Booking.com -- see Michael Forrest Jones' answer to In general, how can you get a reservation at a hotel if their website says they're fully booked? ). Or, if I was getting good rates on walk-in business that night, close us to arrivals on Booking.com and not take any more reservations from them.

Originally appeared on Quora

Choice Hotels announced their intention to take the fight to OTAs by focusing on direct bookings – so why are hotels leaving the system?

Choice charges each of its franchised hotels about 8.5% of their total revenue (regardless of source, even if they don’t refer the business to the hotels) in fees and royalties. In other words, if you operate a Choice-franchised hotel, 8.5% of the money you take in goes straight to them. For most hotels in their system, required purchases and other charges bring the total closer to 12%.

At a Quality Inn that we ran, 12% of our rented rooms are Choice reservations referrals — and half of those originated from online travel agencies.

Any hotel can, with a property management system that costs $1000, give or take, can access a reservation feed from OTAs and GDS (Global Distribution System) sources.

Bottom line: we were paying Choice just under 12% of our revenue, and getting in return only 6% of our business.