We were looking for HRS and hotels.com. You can always consider tripadvisor.com as an OTA as well, or simply set up your Google Business account.

Kind regards

Pierrick

Hi

this depends a little on who you want to sell to. Rather to business guests or leisure guests?

Booking.com works for both, HRS is stronger with business guests. 
If you want to work with discounts, Secret Escapes. For leisure guests, you can also work with TUI and DER. However, they require contingents. I don't know if that will work for you.
Then of course there's Check24, which is currently getting a bit stronger.

Best regards

Leif

If you can avoid it at any cost, steer clear of HRS. Every HRS booking means manual work as HRS still doesn’t properly push data to Channel Managers and therefore into Mews. (i.e. Credit Cards)

I would also stay clear of any of those “old school” contingent ones that block your availability and nothing might come of it. Plus, most of those also mean manually importing the reservations as most of them are not connected to CHM’s at all.

Wether old school works or not depends on the composition of the guests Svenja. ;-)
Incidentally, we have no more or less follow-up with HRS compared to Booking & Co. However, this is also imported via HNS, not directly to Mews.

Best regards

Leif

And what is all your experiences with HotelBeds? We had a contract with them for 3 years, and realised the outcome was higher OCC, but much lower ADR in the end due to Opaque and other discounts. 

On the OTA level, what are the commissions you are paying and what was the reasoning behind it? We were preferred but are considering going down to base.

#newyearnewstrategy

Yes, but I was talking about it from an operational point of view with the goal of not adding more manual work to your day to day operations ;-)

Having a PMS like Mews gives you the power to cut down lots of manual steps and shortening check-in times etc., but if you work with vendors that aren’t compatible with the system logic or worse, don’t even have an integration at all, you might be visible on another platform but in exchange for less streamlined processes - and that’s what I’m all about as you know ;-)

Hi!

I agree with Svenja on HRS … their rate management system is outdated (always has been), they do not push credit card info (you need to retrieve them from the extranet manually), they bring in little volume (at least for us). We keep it active for the occasional business guest who must use their system, but else …

Hotelbeds.com works well for us, but you need to keep an eye on their distribution - some of their partners do operate very nicely (abusing your protected rates like opaque, mobile only, member only, etc...and pushing them on public OTAs/Meta platforms). Furthermore they implement some “rate optimization” where they cancel allready placed bookings and rebook them with a lowered rate if one becomes available or if they get away with rebooking them with mobile/opaque rate plans, even though for the guest nothing changes. So working with them can bring in a lot of volume, but as you said - watch every step with them, do parity checks, test bookings, etc… that’s quite some work to keep them or their sales partners operating correctly. And be open upfront with them on what you don’t want to see happen….and keep a close contact with your market manager at hotelbeds. I guess they do put in a lot of effort to pull market share towards them at the moment.

Take care if you combine payment by booking.com with other wholesalers, as with payment by booking.com comes with “booking.com sponsored benefits” attached to it. Thus, if your parity is not perfectly aligned they might use their margin to stay competitive. And that can pull you in a whirlwind of parity issues with other platforms, like for example Expedia, who may adjust prices on their own again if you permit…

Summary: I kind of hate to say it, but if you want it simple and smooth, booking.com is your friend. If you want to play with the market, go ahead and do it, but it might be challenging - but after all, that’s whats makes it fun, right?

Regards,

JP.

Thank you very much for your reply. Is there maybe still another OTA that works a little bit like booking.com. What about Amadeus? I heared talking about this as well but I couldn’t find any reviews.