As major online travel agency Booking.com faces reports of payment failures in Europe and Asia, some Japanese hoteliers are planning to file a class-action lawsuit against the company.
Trip.com Group believes content providers such as Douyin, the TikTok for China, will find it difficult to replicate the online travel agency experience.
As a marketing professional in the hospitality space, it can be hard to know where your marketing dollars are best invested. Between SEO, PPC, Metasearch, and OTA ads, there are so many channels to choose from—and the ROI will vary greatly from one to the next. But one thing is for sure – you need to be visible where your potential guests are shopping, and OTAs (online travel agencies) are often the first stop in the travel booking journey.
Like the rest of the world, the Eastern Europe region has not escaped the COVID-19 pandemic, although each country's government response has differed, according to Phocuswright's latest travel research report Eastern Europe Travel Market Report 2020-2024.
I am certainly not the first person to remind you what happened after the September 11, 2001, attacks led to an economic downturn with particularly devastating effects on travel and hospitality. When I note that hotels, desperate to fill rooms at almost any rate, turned over inventory to new online partners that promised (and delivered) head in beds, it’s not meant to be a cautionary tale. The fact of the matter is hoteliers are going to find themselves in the exact same situation again as we exit the current COVID-19 pandemic, and there’s not much any of us can do about it.
Google continues to encroach gradually on OTA turf. The tech giant's most recent move was to begin offering exclusive hotel discounts via its Google One cloud storage platform, at the same time announcing the development of a 'hotel-plus-flight product.'
Hotels and online travel booking companies tend to have a marriage of convenience - one that savvy travelers can exploit.
In the battle to convert guest loyalty and guest data ownership from an OTA to your hotel, there are two important contact points that must be monitored and measured.
Austria on Tuesday launched new legislation to outlaw travel websites' practice of forbidding hotels from offering rooms at lower prices on their own sites, following similar moves by France and Germany.
It’s fair to say most people realize that major companies monitor their online browsing and buying activities. But there is something that hotel guests are probably not aware of: according to an article in the UK newspaper The Telegraph, OTAs are using information gleaned from a person’s computer to charge them more for a room.