Ever heard of Smyrooms, Planetrooms, Findhotel, Nustay, Otel, Metglobal, Trip, lol.travel (yes lol), Amoma? Well neither have us and neither have we ever got a booking from any of these. Yet when Booking.com or Tripadvisor rate checks reveals these channels, usually at a lower rate than distributed BAR, we are being penalised on big producing OTA’s. At some clients we closed Agoda due to their ‘instant discount coupon’ they advertise at an (unauthorised) discounted amount, we still get Agoda bookings?!
Yes it has become a true distribution nightmare and usually at the expense of lower production from Expedia and Booking.com. The nightmare gets worse: we contact these channels mentioned above to request (i) direct connection or (ii) remove the listing due to selling lower rates and we get no reply, or reply that ‘we have B2B merchant agreements with one or some of your contracted channels that we aren’t allowed to reveal due to confidentiality clauses’. We then attempt to make test bookings and more than often Hotelbeds or GTA are the main culprits. They would take the intended B2B rate for packaging, strip it ‘naked’ and on-sell to these unknown channels. None of their standard agreements prevent them from doing so and one would have to escalate one by one as the parity cases are reported to Hotelbeds. Whilst this is in progress the disparity scores on B.com drops one point a day. The result is lower ranking, less visibility and less revenue. Some hotels dropped 40% in OTA revenue due to this practise.
Bcom reacted due to the loss of revenue and recently announced booking.basic where they will buy the lower rate and display it under the hotel’s profile. Read more here https://www.mirai.com/blog/booking-com-is-now-offering-third-party-inventory-with-booking-basic/ This is a double edged sword: your hotel’s distribution is uncontrolled, the overall rate is driven down, BAR values are unsold and only net rates are sold and disparity remain.
In addition to the above we have to manage disparity reports on Bcom, quite often following the links in the price performance dashboard reveals ‘broken’ XML’s to Tripadvisor and Google. Despite escalation you get awarded 1 penalty point since ‘the hotel is to manage its distribution’ regardless of incorrect or no prices showing when clicking through.
We at www.hotel-revenue-manager.com have one team member focussing on parity only. It’s a hard and long road if you want to keep wholesale channels open. Inaddtion to action outline earlier we suggest (i) advising the bedbank to not allow MSE distribution (not guaranteed though), (ii) load a MLOS of 2 or 3 nights to prevent disparity alerts. In extreme cases (iii) close them out completely, and /or (iv) end the contract if OTA loss is more than wholesale revenue.
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