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Hotels need to rethink their OTA strategy

December 04, 2009 | Internet Marketing

Major hotel companies have been unable to break the habits of consumers from visiting OTAs in favor of looking and booking at the brand’s proprietary sites. The end result is millions upon millions of dollars being funneled away from individual hotels and into the pockets of the smarter, faster and better marketed OTAs.

There’s a constant struggle bubbling just below the surface in the hospitality business, a push-pull relationship of strange bedfellows that sometimes becomes quite cross. Recently that tenuous partnership was frayed, causing some of those bubbles to pop loudly enough for the entire business to hear. That’s because the relationship between the major hotel brands and Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) is not always symbiotic.

And in what amounted to a much-watched proxy fight for the entire hotel industry, Choice Hotels International and Expedia had a major falling out over the terms of their agreement to work together. Choice yanked their inventory for two weeks before the parties came to an agreement and signed a new three-year deal a couple of weeks back.

Problem is, this agreement has done nothing to solve the larger issue: that major hotel companies have been unable to break the habits of consumers from visiting OTAs in favor of looking and booking at the brand’s proprietary sites.

The end result is millions upon millions of dollars being funneled away from individual hotels and into the pockets of the smarter, faster and better marketed OTAs.

Get the full story at Hotel Interactive

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