Eric Oppegaard
By Corris Little
TORONTO—Fresh from HITEC Toronto, TravelClick’s Lauren Rothrock has given her pitch a hundred times as prospects stopped by to visit the company’s booth: “I’ve been talking about the story of how this came about. We’ve surged investment in our reservation platform and wanted to get ahead of competitors and be a provider for our clients,” she said, referring to TravelClick’s new pricing engine. “Over the past few years, new pricing strategies are popping up left and right and clients are asking for increased flexibility and more options for pricing out rooms and rates.”
What’s driving the change? Namely, the OTAs and then the issue becomes one of pulling hotels out of parity. “The revenue management systems—Duetto, Rainmaker, EasyRMS—and our clients are seeing strategies from these providers or competitors, depending on how they look at them, and want to be able to offer the same pricing strategy or promotion type as the hotel,” said Rothrock, director of product, reservations solutions, at TravelClick. “Recently, OTAs started to blend rates, taking an advance purchase rate and best available. One night may qualify for advance purchase and other dates do not; the OTAs are able to blend these rates. Therefore, guests are actually getting a slightly lower rate on the OTAs and when OTAs are out of parity, it violates the agreement. OTAs are saying they’re able to blend rates because they have more advanced or heightened functionality than the hotels do.”
Read more at Hotel Business.
