Intermediation is usually more sophisticated than hotels and, with the objective of selling more, some channels follow tactics that are not quite ethical, in most cases unknown to the hotel. We are talking about price disparities in which they follow the simple strategy of showing you apparent parity (which you revise from your hotel during working hours) while they show your clients a lower price. Easy and very effective.
We are going to revise the 6 standard practices of intermediation in order to break the price:
By time slot and weekends
This is the simplest and most regular practice. When you are relaxing or sleeping, they act.
- How to detect them? Implement a procedure at the hotel so that the night and weekend receptionists search for price disparities and send you a screenshot every day of the main metasearch engines and OTAs where they found. At some point, you will have to give him a credit card so that they can make bookings in order to see where the disparities are coming from, but that will come at a later stage.
By market
You are in your hotel, where no clients live. Therefore, you can see the prices that they want to programme for you while they show other prices to your clients, lower ones, sadly.
It must be noted that there are OTAs who allow the hotel to charge rates per market. Therefore, before confirming if it’s a price disparity or not, it is important to revise that it’s not an intentionally-charged price (and therefore no longer an unauthorised price disparity). By the way, remember to charge the same rates on your own website as you do to ones you exclusively give to a channel in your own country.
- How to detect them? You need a way to browse the Internet from an IP of another country.
