OTA Auditing & Rate Distribution

Having accurate and current content, plus an attractive image gallery is important to ensure your property is showcased effectively.

  • Review of profiles, imagery and rate feeds
  • Reporting on rate reselling, rate flexing and sub-contracting to third parties
  • Auditing of usage, rates booked, lead times, cancellation risk etc.

Although the objective is to generate the direct sale, OTA profiles must be embraced to ensure they are up to date, well presented, have correct rates and an attractive image gallery. It should be assumed that users will shop around on OTA’s and on seeing your profile, may well view your website if the profile appeals to them.

As best practice it is useful auditing and updating OTA profile content as needed. It is also beneficial to review OTA contracts to understand reselling agreements, rate distribution and auto opt-in policies. Although some contracts are 20 pages long, it is worth being aware of current contract obligations to aid informed decisions. It is also important to report on sell rates in the public domain with a particular focus on rate flexing being used by OTA resellers.

As an example:

  • OTA commission is contracted at 18%
  • OTA sell rate is £150, which has rate parity with property website
  • Property therefore receives £123 and OTA takes £27 (18%) in commission

Issue:

  • OTA decides to resell £150 rate to third party (reseller)
  • Reseller flexes sell rate to £140 by reducing its commission
  • Commission in this example therefore reduces from £27 to £17
  • OTA and reseller agree commission split of £17
  • Property still receives £123
  • Customer sees online reseller rate (usually on metasearch) for £140 – which appears cheaper than agreed OTA rate of £150 and can be detrimental to direct sell rates

Once the above is addressed and acted upon where possible, it is still worth implementing metasearch to present direct property pricing and compete with any OTA reselling and rate flexing.

The above reselling approach has been detrimental to one hotel client in particular with OTA rates being resold and flexed without their knowledge. With a new booking engine put in place that enables metasearch we discussed terminating all OTA contracts with the switchover to the new booking engine and did just that. Although ambitious and ensuring a 100% direct sell strategy, the result eliminated all OTA reselling and  OTA adverts on Google. It has presented the opportunity for metasearch, where the direct pricing will be the only rate featured.