It all makes sense. Whenever I ve priced a hotel online they are matching numbers across the board.

A class-action lawsuit filed yesterday telephone directory united kingdom in a U.S. District Court in California alleges that the biggest names in online travel Priceline, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotels.com telephone directory united kingdom and some of the world s largest hotel chains Hilton, Starwood, Marriott, Intercontinental, among others conspired together so that the best price guarantee you often see when booking a room online is in actuality just a number set by the hotel operators.
The lawsuit telephone directory united kingdom [ PDF ] gets into the various types of arrangements that online travel sites have with hotels, but the complaint boils down to this allegation: Travel websites, in order to claim low-price guarantees, agreed to all set standard minimum pricing for rooms based on rates provided by the hotels; the hotels, in order to keep the revenue from these booking sites, agreed that it would not sell rooms at a rate below what the travel websites are offering.
So if you go to book a room at one of the defendant hotels, the suit claims you ll likely see the same price listed at all of these sites, and that this number isn t determined telephone directory united kingdom competitively by market pressures, but by the hotel.
The large online travel sites, working with hotel chains, have created the illusion that savvy consumers can spend time researching hotel rates online to find good deals," says one of the lawyers behind the lawsuit, which claims that the defendants violated various federal antitrust laws as well as numerous California statutes. "The reality is that these illegal price-parity agreements mean consumers see nothing but cosmetic telephone directory united kingdom differences and the same prices on every site."
Being a cynical telephone directory united kingdom person, I ve sort of assumed there has been some kind of price-fixing going on the whole time. At the very least, the best price was never a free-market concoction; someone has always been manipulating it.
So if you go to book a room at one of the defendant hotels, the suit claims you ll likely see the same price listed at all of these sites, and that this number isn t determined competitively telephone directory united kingdom by market pressures, but by the hotel.
telephone directory united kingdom I don t travel very often, or stay at expensive hotels, telephone directory united kingdom but who uses those travel websites (expedia, etc.).. for booking a simple hotel stay? With all their so-called service fees , the price is always higher than booking from the hotel website directly, or calling. The only 3rd party website I used that was somewhat useful was Hotwire.
Agreed. The restrictions and fees are the killer. I may use the sites to find hotels where I want to stay and then go direct to the hotel for the reservation where I can cancel by 6pm on the night of arrival telephone directory united kingdom in most instances vs the 24 hour minimum notice through the 3rd party sites.
In a bigger city type area like Montreal, you ll probably find all the major players, but in a smaller place, like Drummondville, you may only get 1 or 2 options. And the travel sites can also show you hotels that are near your area. It saves time over having telephone directory united kingdom to go to each chain s site and search town by town.
I operate a hotel. In order to drive business to my hotel, I might allow various third parties to sell a certain number of rooms. However, I will tell those vendors that they cannot sell the rooms for lower than some price since I need to break even (now, it might be below cost, but if I know the average guest will also spend $15 on other things and that combined with the room rate will break even, I will go for that).
I agree. But, I think what price fixing would indicate, is that all of the hotel chains have colluded to set the floor price, ultimately higher than what the free market would likely force prices down to, had the hotels set their floor prices independent of each other.
Hotels always price match any 3rd party site anyways. Most of the time they automatically have a lower rate. If you book through 3rd party sites you are last on the list to have your requests honored and you are the 1st person they plan to screw over in over bookings.
As for market pressure, well, duh. These is the result telephone directory united kingdom of market pressure. They didn t just invent prices that you were forced to pay, but rather prices that you were willing to pay. Just like they ve always telephone directory united kingdom done.
This lawsuit should be the hotels suing the travel sites. I own a small fishing charter telephone directory united kingdom business in Orlando, my entire business relies on tourism. I sell my charters through my website and with Expedia and their other sites like Hotwire they own. My prices on Expedia has to match my website prices. I actually lose money by using Expedia because of the large percentage they take for selling them, it s 30%. Those prices are fixed, you must sign a contract with them and the price must be agreed upon by both parties. They also limit the amount of hotels, and activities per city on their sites. There are tons of hotels here, and not all of them are listed. Same with the activities, there is tons of stuff to do and Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline only select a few to sell. Not sure what consumers expect, there has to be fixed prices, a bottom line price. Another fact is that expedia has concierge desks at many of these hotels. They may also sell activities from the desk that arent listed on the website. And since their Turn over rate on concierge personnel is so high, in order to be remembered is to personally meet each employee at every hotel. Thats dozens of hotels and Employees, every hotel, even disney, have dedicated people that visit these concierge desks. They give them a shirt or hat, anything but money so that their always on the concierge people minds. That adds to a companies expenses, so again there has to he a fixed minimum price. That s how businesses work.
Another example is groupon, in order to be able to get listed the business must cut their price by 50% and give 25% of that price to groupon. So the business only gets 25% of what they are selling. So on a item that I would sell for $200, I would have to drop that to $100 and only get $50 out of the sell. Impossible for many small businesses. They just do that to hopefully get return business but after getting something so cheap, they won t come back and pay full price.
It all makes sense. Whenever I ve priced a hotel online they are matching numbers across the board. Then when I ve called the hotel directly they ll say we will match online prices telephone directory united kingdom well of course they will, it was all agreed upon in the first place! This is wrong on so many levels. I hope this suit forces a change.
Many of the large travel sites like Priceline, Expedia, etc will have similar pricing on hotels. However, some of the smaller booking sites can really have great deals that beat these sites. Sites such as hotelopia.com, onhotels.com, and often have big discounts.