[fwlr]

I’m a receptionist, handle about 150 bookings a week. Two-thirds direct, the other one-third are third-party booking sites. Booking.com (Agoda, Priceline, Kayak) makes up about half of that one-third. The other half of the one-third is equally split between Expedia (hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, Trivago) and a big bunch of various corporate travel agents and agencies.

Despite the proliferation of booking sites on the web, all of them are either part of Bookings Holdings (Booking.com’s parent company, 17bln revenue last year), or part of Expedia Group (11bln revenue last year), and I would expect the distributions of third party bookings at most hotels to roughly reflect that revenue split. There is one other competing group, Trip.com (5bln), but they mostly service China and don’t have as much penetration into Western markets as far as I know.

[severino]

In a hotel like yours, does making the reservation direct, rather than using third-party services, makes any difference (i.e., rates, more available rooms, etc)?

[fwlr]

The only difference is price. The money we get from a third-party site after they take their commission comes out to the same as what we get direct, so the guest is simply paying the third-party site’s commission (usually around 10-12%). It’s that way because we set the price on their channel. The only other downside is changing your booking has to go through them instead of us, and cancellations have to abide by their policies in addition to ours. In practice this doesn’t make much difference to the end result, but it sometimes adds a bit of friction for some guests.

Room availability, staff service, everything else is identical. We have no incentive to encourage you to cut out the middleman and thus we don’t, but to my knowledge we also aren’t prohibited from doing that. Customers do sometimes ask about this stuff and I say “if you know exactly where you want to stay, might as well book direct to save a few dollars, but those sites offer a real service in helping you find a good place when you’re unfamiliar with the area”. Customers also sometimes say they can get a better rate on an OTA than what we are offering, and I always encourage them to book with whatever method gets them the best deal - “we honor all bookings and you will get the exact same room either way”. Usually that better price does not materialize, the guest realizes they were looking at a cheaper room or even a different hotel, though it does happen from time to time even with us (which I have never been able to understand; the OTA must simply be choosing to lose money on those bookings for some reason). We do not overbook, nor do we allow OTAs to overbook.

(I don’t know how representative this is of hotels in general; the owner is particularly upstanding and moral, kind of a “pillar of the community” guy, so this might be an unusually fair setup. But I’ve never heard a customer say we’re unusually fair, so I think this probably is pretty common.)

Essentially the role OTAs play in our case is they are a search engine and perhaps a more convenient booking process, nothing more. I believe this is a common way hotels use OTAs, though that’s just my impression.

The other common way hotels use OTAs is more tightly integrated, OTAs get to do variable pricing and probably other things I don’t know about since we don’t join any of those programs. I can’t speak to those arrangements but I imagine that’s what is going on when the OTA can offer you a better rate than the hotel direct, which definitely does happen with some hotels. That might also be what is going on when you ask questions about OTA rates and it feels like the staff member is under a gag order, but again, I do not know anything at all about that mode of OTA integration.

[severino]

Thanks for your explanation, I love to learn more about the businesses I use through their employees.

About room availability, I thought that if Booking or any other third-party says "this hotel has 5 rooms left", it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)

[fwlr]

I can’t speak to those spooky warnings of “only X left” from OTAs, I assume they’re technically true in some way but heavily massaged to increase anxiety because that improves conversion.

Orchestrating reservations is a lot more streamlined than you’re imagining. All sources have access to the reservation management system and can poll it for availability, while the booking is in progress it simply blocks out the booking with a “pending” booking. When the booking is made, the source adds it to the hotel’s system themselves. I have had customer support with both OTAs on the phone and heard them say “I can see you have this many rooms available…”. So if we have 7 rooms left, Expedia knows we have 7 rooms, Booking.com knows we have 7, and we know we have 7.

The only exception is if we have rooms with potential maintenance issues (air conditioners, TVs, and hot water systems have Heisenbugs too!), we will sometimes reserve one room of that type in case we need to move a guest. In that case, we would have 8 rooms available but Expedia and Booking.com would see 7.

[carlosjobim]

> it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking

Booking.com doesn't know about any rooms that are not made available to them by the hotel, so everything is based on that. In my experience, most hotels just have all their rooms available at all times for booking.com - but maybe some of them experiment with availability to sell a bit more themselves.

The "A person just booked..." and "Only 2 rooms left" messages that booking.com uses to annoy customers are actually correct. I've worked on the other side, and seen from the backend that they don't lie.

> (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)

No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.

[severino]

> No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.

Yes, I think that's feasible. However, I sometimes stay at medium to small size hotels (doing my reservation through Booking or other 3rd parties) but when I get to the place, I can see them managing my stay using Excel files or similar "almost by hand" methods. So I was skeptical that those kind of places had actually a system that can automatically synchronize with all the third party platforms they use in real time.

[carlosjobim]

The absolute best in class of these systems cost $100 per month for a small-medium sized hotel, so it's not expensive at all. Many hotels still refuse to use them because of their own backwardness. Then they screw up and overbook and try to blame booking.com when they don't have a room for them.

[gardenhedge]

Very interesting! Do you think there is space for small or niche players?

[fwlr]

No.

Yes, there is space for small niche sites with certain angles, but all of those sites will still be owned by one of the big two parents. There isn’t even much space for a niche player intending to eventually get bought out by one of the big groups like you see in some software fields, because hotels are pretty risk-averse in general and won’t just hand out access to their reservation channels to small players easily.

[ricktdotorg]

great mini-thread! thank you for your industry insight!

[splonk]

I did some work on hotel booking for one of the the "small" players in the space (at the time, a distant third in the EU after Booking/Expedia). The majority of their room availability was sourced through the two big players. That's probably going to be the case for most aggregators, and there's a fair chance that your favorite non-Booking/Expedia aggregator is actually just selling you their content and collecting around 10%.

[carlosjobim]

Much less than 10% usually for these 4th-party aggregators.