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Have Hotel Rooms Become a Commodity?Nowadays, more travel is sold over the Internet than any other consumer product. In the United States Internet-booked rooms is the fastest-growing segment of hotel reservations in part because the Internet is a perfect medium for selling travel as it brings a vast network of suppliers and a widely dispersed customer pool together into a centralized market place. In fact, the travel marketplace is a global arena where millions of buyers (travel agents and the public) search for travel services and sellers (hotels, airlines, car rental companies, etc.) work together to exchange travel services on the world's global distribution systems and the Internet distribution systems. However, any mention of the Internet as a
distribution channel for travel needs to start with
an understanding of the existing electronic
distribution infrastructure, the Global Distribution
System (GDS). The airline industry created the first
GDS in the 1960s as a way to keep track of flight
schedules, availability, and prices. The legacy of these GDS’s, namely Amadeus,
Galileo, Sabre and Worldspan, today provide the
backbone to the Internet travel distribution system
and additionally there are thousands of private
label Web sites like Expedia and Orbitz, as well as
hundreds of tour operators, corporate booking
portals, and regional convention coordinators.
Yet although
technology has given hoteliers so many ways to sell a
room, it has become nearly impossible for a smaller
hotel operator to understand, let alone intelligently
manage the available channels for room sales. In fact
if you are the average small hotel, many of these
channels have an allotment of your rooms, and it is
likely most are showing out of date rates and
incorrect availability.
Communicating with all of these channels in order to
keep them current on your inventory and rates,
requires in some cases, daily manual intervention with
multiple faxes and phone calls. More importantly,
verifying the accuracy of each channel's current
allotment and rate by the property is critical but
rarely automated. Most times hotel operators do not
know where or how their rooms are being sold or at
what rate until the booking confirmation arrives.
The tangle
of reservation channels is not likely to be simplified
soon. But with regard to the easy accessibility of
hotel reservations on the Internet directly booked
from hotel websites with their own integrated
reservations systems, the system is working.
Unfortunately even now, the overwhelming majority of
small to medium sized hoteliers far from realizing and
exploiting the Web's true potential are still
accepting bookings by telephone, form and fax from
their websites or selling their inventory at reduced
rates or high commissions via Web-proficient online
intermediaries.
As such,
hoteliers, who want to broaden their room’s
distribution intelligently, improve margins and
maintain their brand identity in the face of on-line
distributors that would turn hotel rooms into a
lowest-price commodity should seriously consider
integrating a real time reservations system into their
own website for the ultimate benefit of their own
hotel and visitors.
After all,
commodities tend to look and taste the same. Do
visitors want a box they will rent if the price is
right or a room experience they will wish to revisit
again and again?
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