Similar to their counterparts in the US and Europe, hotels in Asia are heavily dependent on regional and global OTAs to generate online bookings. Instead of maintaining rate parity across all sites, they prefer to offer their best & cheapest rates to their OTA partners.

RateGain published hotel rate parity trends for January to March 2012 of three, four and five star hotels across some of the major cities in Asia. The report shows the percentage of hotels with cheaper rates on their own brand site compared to their rates on other OTAs.

In 3 star category, on an average only 6% of the hotels maintain rate parity between their brand sites and different channels where as 25% of the hotels are cheaper on their brand sites. 69% of hotels in this category are offering cheaper rates on OTA sites, exceptional being Mumbai and Hong Kong where hotels are trying to maintain and equal balance of their rates on brand and OTA sites.

In 4 star category, only 20% of the hotels are cheaper on their brand sites where as 80% of these hotels prefer being cheaper on their OTA partners. Major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bali, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore and Phuket are clearly dominated by OTAs.

Similar is the case with 5 star category of hotels – 75% of the hotels are cheaper on OTA sites.

Get the full story at RateGain Blog.