Sales & Marketing

There are several major developments working against the bed banks sector: 1) Shrinkage of the brick-and-mortar distribution marketplace due to consumers shifting to online travel planning and booking. There are less than 7,500 travel agencies in the U.S.

In the non-US marketplace, bed banks continue to play an essential role, providing both offline and online intermediaries with a long tail of hotel inventory that would be impossible to source otherwise. Assuming historical bad behaviour regarding abuse of net rates can be controlled, newly consolidated and professionalised bed bank companies can have a long and happy future.

Bedbanks business may contract over time, however, they will remain a significant player in the online travel marketplace due to the large number of consumers who prefer to have their local travel agent make their travel arrangements.

Building a hotelier-owned OTA is such a hotelier's pipe dream! Expedia spent billions of dollars building its current CRS platform now being used across its portfolio(Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Wotif). In addition, Expedia spends $6 billion on marketing EVERY YEAR.

No - that wouldn't have a strong chance of success. The hotel business is primarily a hospitality retail and real estate business - not a high-performance e-commerce business. The expertise and skills required to be successful as a hotelier are vastly different from the attributes required to succeed in the OTA business.

A hotel-owned OTA? Sorry, everyone, you may have the cart before the horse! How about an OTA that buys a hotel brand? I made this bold forecast back (maybe) six-seven years ago. What is a hotel brand, really, without distribution?

In my view, this new Expedia program is designed as a very clever additional entanglement of hoteliers to Expedia. It is just an additional length of rope that ties hotels closer to Expedia and increases their dependency on this OTA.Will hoteliers buy into Expedia's program?

Of more recent times there's been the beginning of a right sizing in the distribution world. Google's move to democratize the travel search experience has changed the dynamic on how people find their travel ideas and destinations.

In a nutshell: That's not a good deal and with these acquisition costs the hotel can do its own recovery programme.My math teacher at school used to tell me that speaking about a percentage of another percentage is something unused and generally wrong.