white paper Understanding Business Travelers
H
otel marketers are convinced that the future is on the internet, and that travelers will gravitate inevitably and inexorably to this booking channel. They may be right, but if they are they are in for a shock: on-line booking is not
seen by travelers as the panacea that hoteliers would like them to think they are; hotel sites are not seen as marketing tools as much as they are information sources and convenience providers; and on-line travel sites such as Travelocity and Hotels.com are poised to suck margin out of hotels’ bottom line like a Dyson vacuum cleaner.
Let’s deal with the last point first. On -line travel sites are the big box stores of travel – category killers as it were. It is surprising that after so many years of recruiting package goods trained marketers, hotel brands have not seen the parallel, and missed opportunities to manage the outcome in their favor.
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The general response by hotels to on -line travel sites is something less than tolerance. There is a grudging acceptance that they are there and they need to be catered to – after all, they sell millions of room nights. But that’s where it ends. There is a generalized hope that travelers will see the light and take advantage of “best
available prices” on brand websites (with the especially fantastic idea that people will compare properties on the consolidated sites and then go to the hotel site to book). There is no obvious channel strategy that would allow hotel brands to benefit from the situation. To most hotel companies it is a matter of revenue management. Period. From the travel sites perspective it is entirely different. If all they do is pass along third party products (airlines, hotels, cruises, etc.) at the best negotiated price, they are nothing more than a commodity in a highly transparent, easy to access, low cost of entry commodity market-