“Direct is best”; “101 ways to avoid paying OTAs”; even “How to Win The OTA War”. We’ve all seen countless taglines and blog posts of this nature. In fact, we’ve written a significant number of them ourselves!
Alas, times have changed.
Hotel booking engines are vitally important. But they’re now secondary.
There, I’ve said it. This should come of little surprise (no matter how hard it might be to read), when you consider the habits of the millennial generation. According to data from Expedia, millennials tend to be less brand loyal than their parents, and appear to be drawn to the simplicity and choice offered by OTAs.
Put simply, they’re far more likely to book a hotel room via an OTA, and that’s important, because they’re the biggest generation in existence.
Yet still large chunks of the hospitality sector stick out their bottom lip, stamp their feet and sulk their way through the OTA relationship, while thinking nothing of booking their airline tickets, hire cars or insurance through the online consolidators.
The story of 2017
It’s not all about the millennial generation. Our own statistics also reflect the habits, needs and wants of the modern day traveller.
During 2017, Welcome Anywhere processed £74m of hotel reservations. Over fifty percent of those bookings came from Booking.com with the number of direct bookings decreasing by almost £2m in value.
These figures may be alarming to some, but to us, they offer a key insight into how the modern hospitality industry – and the guests that fuel it – operates.
Old rhetoric
Hotels that cling to the old rhetoric are effectively saying “we don’t want to provide what our prospective guests want”. I find that astonishing; it’s no more out of step with the times than saying “sorry, we don’t take contactless payments”.
And then there’s the whole ‘cost of acquisition’ thing, which is easier to summarise than some might lead many to believe; the OTAs are the de facto cost of acquisition these days. Period.
While the cost of using OTAs is often quoted, the cost of not using them gets little airtime. It’s absolutely possible for a hotel to market its rooms without OTAs, by taking a few small steps. These include:
