Helping you fill spare rooms or fishing for all your bookings?
Hoteliers have engaged with the major booking engines and are always told that 15% is necessary. They started off charging much less but over time the fees have increased to the 15% we commonly see today. At Fairer Fees we don’t believe the online agent’s business model is about selling rooms that hotels can’t fill, it’s actually about getting between the customer and the hotel so that customers book through agents rather than direct with the hotel.
To maintain this model the online agents have to spend-spend-spend with the likes of Google on paid for links so that whenever anyone searches for your hotel or to stay in your local area, the first thing they see is a paid for link and not what they were specifically searching for.
Think about it this way – You’re actually paying a slice of that 15% to help keep customers away from your website. These sites may sell the odd additional room but on most occasions the customer was coming anyway.
Published on May 15th, 2010 Uncategorized | 1 Comment
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As a paying customer I totally agree with this. I’ve already decided to go to Ullapool for a June break and that decision had nothing to do with any adverts that any of the big 4 online booking agents are running. However, when I go to google B+B’s in Ullapool, guess what, laterooms, tripadvisor and expedia all squatting on my search terms!