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Dear All,

When receiving bookings made though the OTA Expedia, we see that there are 2 different types of bookings:

  • Hotel Collect : meaning the clients pay on-site and commission invoice gets sent at the end of the month for checking. Rate of the reservation is therefore GROSS, commission is included in it.
  • Virtual Card : meaning the clients have paid at booking and expedia has already received their commission directly, no invoice is sent. Rate of the reservation is therefore NET, commission has been deducted from a higher rate and arrives to you excluded.

Consequently, the decision of booking with Virtual Card makes a difference in on average daily rate.

We are seeking for the best way to see the gross amount on our account reports so that our ADR is correct.

One idea would be to increase the rate of the Expedia Virtual Card by calculing what the gross amount is by using the relative adjustment and settling the invoice with 2 means of payment:

  • payment by selecting “commission” for the amount the commission calculated
  • payment by selcting “credit card” for the remaing amount (that is to say amount showing on the booking)

This requires some attention as we have to go on each booking to make the adjustment.

How do you, hoteliers, deal with this on a day-to-day basis ?

Do you have a particular way to deal with it ?

Thank you!

Marie

 

 

Hello!

I agree that this is a desireable analytics feature, but I would not think this is solveable in a clean way in accounting. Considering your suggestion of increasing the rate by the comission amount, that has a few problems attached to it:

  • your increased rate will show up as revenue in your accounting reports, just settling the “virtual” comission part will not lower your revenue, you would have to later manually adjust revenue in your accounting
  • Local Taxes, VAT, etc are mostly also calculated based on the room rate, so that would also increase your tax numbers and mess with this.
  • It’s factually incorrect, since you are selling the rooms at a net (lower) rate to expedia, and they resell it to the guest, so if you increase the rate artificially, that just looks wrong.
  • you are not receiving any commission invoice from expedia that you could use to adjust your income.
  • I don’t know how that interacts with any fiscal integrations / cash registers that you may need to have depending on your location

So, in summary, I would stay away from such an approach, especially if that includes manual intervention for each booking.

An idea - I am not sure if that would work, but instead of using a comission “payment” method you could use an adjustment “product” to lower the rate back to the net rate, after it is raised by the travel agency account setup. If you are actually receiving different sources from your channel manager for Exedia Collect and Hotel Collect, you could acutally setup routing rules to to that automatically. I am not sure if that correctly adjusts the ADR in reports (are stay service adjustment products included in the ADR or not, I am not sure at the moment) or not … you could try that in your demo environment, I guess…?

If you want adjusted ADR in analytics, you may do that in your analytics solution - be it excel or whatever… there you could try to adjust expedia reservations ADR by the usual margin. It might me a feature idea for MEWS Analytics - beeing able to show “adjusted” rates for reservations where the travel agent account setup indicates that commission is not included in the rate. In the end it’s a matter of how you define ADR, and if you are using it to compare YoY or other time series … then what counts more, I believe, is to be reasonably sure that the ADR is always calculated in the sameway, rathen than it’s absulute value. Also, consider the approx. share of expedia, maybe 10%, then your ADR would be off by about 1-2% in total value… is that worth the effort?

On the other hand, what are you trying to look at? Actual market sell rates? But for expedia and any other reseller/wholesaler, you can only guess what the final price was for the guest, as it might be packaged with other travel arangment, the markup could have been lower as you assume, ….

Hope my thoughts are helpful,🤔😉

regards,

Jean-Philipp.

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