Sales & Marketing

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.

Ever hear of a pendulum swing? Finally, revenue managers will have to become real digital marketers, versus simply playing with past data to formulate their plans. This is an exciting, brave new world! What I would like to see is AI-generated marketing programs that look OUTSIDE of travel history, but cross reference psycho-graphics, based upon buying patterns and habits.

These are unprecedented times. Many have cited earlier events such as SARS, the global financial crisis and the Asian financial crisis. I was active in industry and in location through all of these. NONE of these remotely resemble the nature of COVID19.

Excellent post, Max. Thinking long term is hard right now and we can see that in the actions of many in the industry who are scrambling between laying off and furloughing employees, worrying about cash flow, trying to get refunds on media investments, and anticipating a rebound date that keeps moving.