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By: Frank Osei-Bonsu, Sun Sep 21st, 2008
I am writing this to support my article which was published last year at various web sites “The Demise of Small Scale Online Hotel Reservation Agencies”
An excerpt from the article was “The online hotel reservation business is almost dead now. As a small hotel reservation agency, we now struggle to get 300 booking every month. In our early years in the business, there were months that we recorded 900 bookings from our web sites London bed and breakfast , London discount hotels , London hotel booking , London hotels and bed and breakfast, Cheap hotels in London
Some of the reasons to the low volume of business nowadays are that, it looks like every hotel now has its own web page on the internet and don’t rely solely on the booking agencies to give them a page on their servers to advertise their hotels. These hotels themselves have now turned to be competitors to the booking agencies and they have the advantage over the booking agencies. Firstly, they can offer lower rates from their sites at anytime that they choose to. These offers most of the time do not extend to the web sites of the booking agencies. Travellers nowadays are looking for bargains. They don’t just book a hotel from the very first page that they see. They go through a lot of web pages before making a decision on which page they book from.
Once they stumble on a hotel’s own web page, they look for the offers and in most of the time, they find them there. Travellers also think that, by booking directly at the hotel’s own web site, you reduce the risk of the hotel not having your records on your arrival at the hotel on a very cold winter night. Many of them now even prefer to call the hotel direct when they get their number from the page to make sure that they register their booking with someone at the reservations department at the hotel.
Small scale Booking agencies are now trying to find solutions to the problem to make them stay in business, and they have resulted to forming some king of affiliation with the Big Companies. If you visit Hotel offers london ,Guoman hotels london and thistle Hotels London as well as London hotel booking you will find a lot of links which take you to other booking agencies web sits. Nowadays there are quite too many of Hotel booking agencies on the internet and net users find it even difficult which ones are genuine and which ones are not. They are all now competing for the business of those internet users who still make their bookings through the agents with the hope of getting better negotiated rates.
The Bigger booking agencies that have the financial power and are able to put up very good structures are now making the small ones captive to the industry. Nowadays, when you visit the Hotel reservation pages of Expedia, activehotels.com, hotels.com , hotelbook.com , Xcapewithus.com, to mention but a few, there are links on their pages for individuals who have web sites and hotels booking agencies to sign up as affiliates. After signing us with them, as we did with our web sites Central London hotels , Cheap London hotels and London stay and London Vacation , Cheap bed and breakfast in London, London Travel they give you html codes which you embed in your web pages. When a visitor comes to your page and click on any of their links he or she is taken to their booking engine where the visitor can complete a hotel reservation. What you get for putting their link on you page is just a percentage of the commission of the bookings made, which they will claim from the hotels.
Although you get reduced commission, you significantly cut down cost because there is no need to spend money to get your own booking engine which can be sometimes very expensive. You will not need to worry about customer care because the entire burden now rests on the company you have signed up with. .
All that the small booking agency needs to do is to promote the web site and some are doing it with a lot of pay per click companies. A typical examples of such web sites are Central London cheap apartments, Cheap London apartments and Budget London hotels . Some also are cheap London bed and breakfast and Hotels in London
Will there be a time that these small agencies will bounce back? Will they be the need for them to do that? Answers to these question would be in my next article.