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Here are a couple of |
On line room reservations! Who has the answer? What do you know that I don’t? I read everywhere that on-line travel is booming. I see on our own web sites that folks are clicking like crazy both on our own hotel and accommodation supplier adverts and those placed on our domains by outside sources. I see that we can get a hundred accommodation requests a day if we want to deal with them. The audience is there. The action is there. The interest is there. What I do not know is after a viewer clicks on, say, the hotel wonderful advertisement, do they actually rent a room? No idea, and no way of knowing. Heck the hotel will never tell me, its just not done. They will almost always say that they sold nothing; knowing, or at least thinking, that if I am aware they are reaping great profits as a result of being on our domain, I will raise the rates. Whatever! So that makes me reliant on news about the likes of Travelocity, Hotels.com and other big fish in the on-line sea. And brother, according to everything that I read, these dudes are cleaning up. Big time. But what’s their business model? Have they the funds to go around buying up rooms in bulk at very low prices? Err, yep. And have they big advertising budgets? Err, yep. So that explains it then, doesn’t it? Err, not quite. It explains a lot, to be sure. But what is still shrouded in the fog of uncertainty is how to deal with John Q. You know, the public. You see, when it comes to Internet booking, traveling consumers want it all. And they want it at no charge and no inconvenience; frequently not even at the cost of a minimum effort in common courtesy or politeness. Perish the thought that you (the Internet site producer) have to show a profit in order to keep providing this truly valuable information. Examples? I can relate hundreds. Countless times through our Internet sites (we have 100 travel domains) we get a request for a hotel somewhere in a perceived paradise. We made countless telephone calls and sent hundreds of emails that were replied to by at least half of the hotels solicited. All of these were sent to the prospective traveler and not one in fifty even bothered to reply. Not a yes, not a no, not a maybe. Zilch! Not one in fifty. Folks are content just to let web site publishers work for free on their behalf. Then after they are satisfied that the web owners have done their comparison shopping for them, they simply sit back with the results, make their choice direct or not at all, and don’t give back so much as a word of thanks. However if you ask them to prove the sincerity of their intentions by, say, providing credit card details at the request stage, they avoid you like the plague. You will get almost no requests, save for the ones that are nearly impossible to fill. And what about the hotels we are bothering with these air bag requests? How long do you think they will provide us with any credibility factor at all if few of our clients even answer, let alone make a booking? Not long mate, not long. It gets worse. Sometimes even the prospective client will signal their intentions to buy, and then take the process right up to the doors of the bank, as it were. Then at the last minute they’re gone and never heard from again. Gone where? Who knows for sure, but I have a theory. Gone directly to the hotel is my best assumption. And the hotel, now free from the yoke of middleman’s commission, provides John Q with a slightly lower price. So where is the boom in on line travel coming from and who is it going to? Our money is on the big players mentioned above. As well anyone that has room allotments has a good chance of doing business on line. The idea is you have to have something to sell and the wherewithal to sell it. That means you have to do real time selling and have a reservations engine that provides security and the means to take payment on line (we developed and sell one, it’s called ManagEasy). And, last but not least, you certainly have to make it clear to traveling consumers that this is not a “tire kicking” operation, it is a sales point. So that's my two cents worth, but what am I going to do about it? Well number one I am going to affiliate with one of the big boys. Hello, Hotels.com! Number two, I am going to ask every consumer that comes to me direct (we serve niche markets that even the giants don't cover) to deposit 10 Euro (about 12 bucks) before we start to work on their behalf. We will give this back if the consumer makes a reservation, and keep it if they don't. The
days of the free ride are over for Activelifestyle. |