On 3 separate occasions last week, I directly emailed industry colleagues at hotels to inquire about rates.

On all 3 occasions, their “friendly offer” was above that of the booking.com rate when the genius program kicked in.

For the purpose of this, let's assume they do actually like me and the rate wasn’t just for me (I double checked on the website).

So if they were losing roughly 18% if I went via an OTA, why not play with this margin as I’m going direct?

The knock on impact is, I mentioned this in many conversations over the last few days to avid travellers and our view ended up being, we should just go direct to OTA’s now and not bother sending emails to the hotels.

I also do a lot of meetings when I travel and would have hosted a few meetings there, I also would have spent above average on f&b.

I’m now looking for the most seamless way to book, access my room and take away any pointless admin, I’m less worried about rates as I now trust booking.com to give me the best rate.

I’m in the industry and very conscious of booking direct and now the industry has lost me. Where does it go next?

Max Starkov's view:

While the hospitality industry was struggling to survive during the pandemic Expedia and Booking were hard at work to build their loyalty programs.

The results? Both Expedia’s One Key and Booking’s Genius loyalty programs boast cutting-edge loyalty tech platforms, 170 plus million loyalty members each, 360,000 participating hotels providing both programs with special membership rates.

Why is this important? These loyalty programs will help the OTAs increase repeat business and market share at the expense of the direct channel, and lower their performance marketing spend, currently exceeding $12 billion/year!

A loyalty program is not just a “point- or discount-dispensing machine”, but a database of first-party membership data, which is priceless in this era of search engines and browsers (Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Firefox) discontinuing their support of third-party cookies and privacy protection moves.

Loyalty member preferences, lifetime value (LTV), past purchasing and browsing behavior are now being actively used by the OTAs to engage, convert and retain loyalty members and to improve brand marketing, CRM, personalization, customer service, upsells and in-destination experiences.

Mark Abraham
Hotel Podcaster, Founder & CEO at Shackle

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