on its Web site.
Companies offering lower prices on own Web sites
Competition is prompting hotels to make a competitive move against third-party booking agencies, including Orbitz.com, Expedia.com and Hotels.com, in order to lure more business to the hotels’ own branded sites.
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J. Rudi Heater, general manager of the Crowne Plaza Hotel and the Holiday Inn Express Hotel and Suites in Warwick, said Six Continents, the hotels’ parent company, is including its own Web sites in a mass-marketing campaign in order to cut rates for customers.
“When third-party sites came to being and were mass-marketing, there was a definite spike in their usage,” he said. “However, since the lowest price guarantee has been out there, it’s been flattened out.”
In order to have more control, Six Continents, along with five other chains including Hyatt, have joined together to form the Dallas, Texas-based TravelWeb LLC, a company which launched the Web site, www.travelweb.com, to offer lower hotel rates.
The numbers of people booking on Crowne Plaza’s site has increased since the 266-room hotel began offering lower rates on its own site compared to that of third-party sites.
“Nearly 85 percent or greater of online bookings came from our site,” Heater said.
The Hyatt Regency on Newport’s Goat Island is offering the same guaranteed lowest rate promise, according to Thomas Delaney, the general manager.
“We re-engineered Hyatt.com to offer the lowest price in the chain,” Delaney said of Hyatt.com. “We are promoting the lowest rate that Hyatt sells on our site instead of other (third-party) sites.”
In 2002, the Newport Hyatt saw “tremendous growth,” Delaney added. “And it’s become a more viable way to do bookings.”
Although hotels are finding ways to keep up with the times, they said the Internet is taking the industry by storm.
“In the first year, it was less than 1 percent of reservations,” Heater said. “We are now knocking hard at 20 percent.”
The Hyatt’s numbers, Delaney added, are increasing year-to-year.
“We started getting heavily involved in 1998 and have seen tremendous volume bookings from online vs. through traditional outlets,” Delaney said.
Newport’s Hyatt receives more of its reservations through traditional means including phone bookings and through travel agencies.
Listing its availability on some of the nation’s top Internet travel sites, including Orbitz, Expedia and Priceline, is just another way of drumming up business.
“Of course we benefit from being listed on a site,” Delaney said.
The most expensive way of booking a hotel room is the traditional way.
Yes, some admit that booking through third-party Web sites is a less expensive means than picking up the phone or working through a travel agent, but booking through individual hotels’ Web sites is more beneficial to the customer.
“If someone books through the Hyatt site, it’s more beneficial to customers, because managing our own site is less expensive,” Delaney said. “We’re able to pass the savings on to the customer and guarantee a lower rate.”
Delaney would not disclose Hyatt’s agreements with different sites, adding “each contract is different.”
Heater does not knock the more than a dozen companies offering low travel and hotel rates via the Internet, instead the group wants to be the first point of resource for an individual’s Internet bookings and it wants to have control over some of its prices and inventory.
Hotels have that with Norwalk, Conn.-based Priceline.com, according to spokesperson Brian Ek.
Priceline.com’s model, unlike other travel sites including Expedia and Hotels.com, allows hotels to control their own inventory.
“Priceline happens to be a distribution system that, from its outset, gives hotels 100 percent control of inventory and pricing,” Ek said.
“With a typical retail site, hotels commit percentages of inventory and are locked into for a set period of time (and have control over how much the room is sold for online).”
“Others do that, not Priceline,” Ek added. Priceline.com, however, late last month acquired a 14 percent equity stake in Travelweb.com through an $8.5 million investment.
Travelweb, under terms of the agreement, will become the exclusive provider
of published-price, net rate inventory in the Unites States and Canada that
will be available on both Lowestfare.com (the retail travel service operated
by Priceline.com) and on Priceline.com. The companies said they expect to integrate
Travelweb’s hotel inventory on these sites beginning in the second quarter 2003.
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