Online hotels market
May 18th, 2009
I was thinking today (i have been known to do it) about how the internet has changed the face of online travel with hotels specifically in mind. Its not just here at CheaphotelsinNewcastle that ive seen some great deals lately but all over the net. It often makes we wonder what people did before they had the web to search and compare accommodation from all over the world at a single click. I suppose the main avenue used to be travel agents who would often book the entire trip including the flight and all accommodation. The problem with this method is that you didn’t actually know the price of the different parts of the package, ie some would be cheaper but some really expensive and so the price of the overall trip would even out.
The main advantage with booking the parts of your holiday separately is that you can see what everything is costing on an individual basis and so try to get the price down for those parts individually. This has become so common these days that i have seen alot of high street travel agents go bust as they just cant compete with the online dealers. In a way it makes sense because the costs of owning a high street travel agent are so high with staff and rental overheads that i cant believe more of them haven’t went out of business. Thing is this whole situation isnt location specific as i have seen it with cheap hotels in London too which is new.
One thing that i do still find quite surprising though when looking at some cheap hotels in Newcastle is how few of the hotels have their own booking online booking service. Was looking at the Hadrian hotels site today and they too are sending people to a third party at eviivo. Ive never heard of them before but they sound quite similar to a company called Avvio who do alot of business in Ireland. I understand that it does cost to setup an online booking service but these actual hotel sites have to realise they are essentially advertising a third party product on their own site. It really makes we wonder how much your average small hotel is losing in commissions every year due to bookings on their own site.