Yeoh Siew Hoon catches up with Chris Morris, who's now running AsiaRooms from Manchester; the LateRooms boss shares plans for making AsiaRooms a friend of hoteliers.

AsiaRooms, part of TUI Travel PLC, is coming in from the cold to play ball with hoteliers.

Long the "bad boy" of accommodation websites because of its practice of loading wholesale rates and marking them up and wreaking havoc with hoteliers' rate parity ambitions, AsiaRooms, under new management effective August, has moved to the commissionable model.

Managing director of LateRooms, Chris Morris, who's now in charge of AsiaRooms, said, "It was run as an independent business (after acquisition) and it was very successful on that model which was appropriate five years ago but we felt it was the right time to move to a commissionable model."

It's spent the past few months building relationships with hoteliers in Asia Pacific. Its team of 25 in Asia includes staff based in Singapore, headed by Kathy Gwinnett, Hotel Relationships Director – B2C Division, who are focused on building content for the site.

In some ways, the shift from merchant to commissionable model was inevitable. It was clear LateRooms could not afford to jeopardise the long-standing relationships it has with hoteliers around the world, while operating a model such as AsiaRooms in Asia.

"It is in our interests longterm to have good working relationships with hoteliers," said Morris. "It's the right thing to do now. The market has changed. Accommodation only travel agents have moved to the OTA model. Hoteliers want to control their product more."

Its move to a commissionable model puts it more in direct competition with other OTAs such as Wotif and Agoda but Morris said "we have always been competing anyway because consumers don't care so really the competitive landscape hasn't changed for the customer".

As to whether it removes the one advantage AsiaRooms had over other OTAs – competitive pricing due to its access to wholesale rates, Morris said that form of aggressive pricing would have been difficult to sustain in the medium to longterm.

"We would rather have hotels as partners and customers," he said. "If pricing is your only competitive advantage, it makes you vulnerable."

He added however, "We are still competitive but in a more transparent way. We also have access to LateRooms content and this enables us to have one platform for both websites."

Morris said that Europe and UK  had shown strong growth for AsiaRooms this year, almost a 70% increase in bookings. "It's a channel shift, not market growth. It's how customers are choosing to buy this year."

He said he was seeing similar trends in UK and Europe with more consumers moving online. "While the growth is faster in Asia, both markets have a long way to go."

With AsiaRooms only available in the English language, Morris said the site had done well in longhaul markets such as US, Europe and South Africa but it would now attempt to build up the intra-regional market with different language versions.

Known for being very aggressive on SEM – to the extent of frustrating consumer searches, AsiaRooms will also be addressing its SEM tactics.

Said Morris, "While AsiaRooms has a lot of profile on the web, it hasn't done a lot of brand building and we want to address that. We will no longer be throwing money at SEM and disrupting the consumer search process.

"What we want to do is improve the user experience and build customer loyalty."

Morris, who's been with LateRooms for 10 years, also said travel search has not had much of an impact on its business in the UK. "It's about our relationship with the customer. If they know they'll get a good price with us, they don't need to go anywhere."

LateRooms introduced a mobile application two years ago but Morris said it's not "really evolved yet". "It's exceptionally small and it's something we will continue to watch."

Also on watching brief is social media – "companies still haven't figured out how to make a business out of it yet".

Yeoh Siew Hoon, one of Asia's most respected travel editors and commentators, writes a regular column on news, trends and issues in the hospitality industry for 4Hoteliers.com.

Siew Hoon, who has covered the tourism industry in Asia/Pacific for the past 20 years, runs SHY Ventures Pte Ltd. Her other writings can be found at www.thetransitcafe.com

Get your weekly cuppa of news, gossip, humour and opinion at the cafe for travel insiders.

4Hoteliers is the "Official Daily News" of WIT09 - www.webintravel.com