When someone looks for a hotel on Google and sees the different prices, there is often many different options that can be considered “sketchy” (Bluepillow for example). I’m curious to see what your experiences are from these “OTA’s” that you may not have connected or agreed to but show up anyways.
Do you know how they get their prices? How do you get them turned off? Will Google help with this or do you need to reach out to each OTA individually?
Hello
That’s a big “swamp”, hard to conquer and map 😀 … let’s try to give an outline from my experience:
Usually they get their prices through wholesalers like G2 Travel, Hotelbeds.com, but sometimes also from Expedia or even booking.com. Prerequisite for these models to work usually is that the payment from the end customer is processed by the primary contracted OTA/wholesaler, because that allows them to make special discounts on their own cost (to gain market share, prohibit direct booklngs).
Wholesaler usually have an agreed upon margin for redistribution, but that is not necessarily a hard value, and sometimes they redistribute at a lower margin than initially anticipated...sometimes their third party partners don’t stick to the plan, sometimes there are just mistakes, hard to tell ...
However, I have seen some very shady operations, mostly asian companies, that grab some fenced or restricted rates (like mobile only, members only) from their source partners (like Expedia, or an other wholesaler, maybe without them even knowing about it…!) and publish them publicly.
Sometimes it’s also a bait and switch tactics by some shady “OTA”s, like showing a lower price on meta, once on site the price needs to be “verified” or “reconfirmed” and then changes, sometimes is not available at all any more, sometimes meta-search data is just not up-to-date, sometimes the lower offerings only apply when coming from trivago, but not google, or any other way round … sometimes one just cannot figure out how and why a price is determined.
The actual source and actual final price of each offering can only be verified only by makeing test bookings, but since they often source their prices and availabilities from many different sources at the same time, that can be a fast moving target … 👻
To get rid of them, one can only try to cancel contracts with wholesalers, disable OTA packaged rates (e.g. expedia collect), and disable payments OTA (like via booking.com), but that also narrows distribution considerably, so this is the “thermonuclear” option 💀🤔
Probably the best way is to keep an eye on meta search and aim for parity. Hunt down offers that are clearly not in line with your agreed upon contracts, make test bookings, and ask the partners where test bookings actually come through to get back in line with the contract or common good business practices.
Good luck and happy price hunting :-) 🕵🏻
Regards,
JP.
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