Your Contacts for doing deals at Lodging Properties:
• Dir of Sales - medium to larger properties with 100+ rooms will have a sales director. This is your first contact person you want to reach at the lodging property/hotel to discuss a partnership.
• Revenue Manager - largest hotel 200+ rooms will have a revenue manager who oversees all the rates, pricing and managing inventory. Seek to talk to this person first at the larger properties. He/She may tell you to start with the director of sales.
• Owners/GM - the smaller properties less than 100 rooms including resorts and Inns seek to speak with the owner or general manager. Central Reservation System, Property Management System- also abbreviated as CRS, and PMS are the main internal systems the lodging properties use to manage their availability, rates, and inventory.
In-house/On Property Bookings/Reservations - lodging properties both big and small receive bookings/reservations through three main areas, their website/booking engine, 800# call center that they manage themselves or outsource or is run by the corporate entity (think Holiday Corporate Reservations) and then the front desk.
3rd Party Distribution Channels - lodging properties distribute or resell their rooms to four main channels, GDSs, OTAs, FIT Wholesalers, and individual online travel businesses or travel merchants.
• GDS - The four large GDS's are Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport, Galileo, these companies built the original systems that enabled travel agencies and travel agents to book airline tickets with the major airlines. Today the GDS's represent a majority of all the hotel rooms and car rentals in the country. Travel agencies and travel agents have computer systems that connect them to the GDS's in which they book their clients travel. Most GDS's pay the travel agent a 10% commission on the bookings. This network and distribution channel was historically the hotels main 3rd party distribution channel but has been reduced over time as more travel agents and travel agencies close their doors and travellers make reservations themselves directly through the hotels website and or online through the OTAs, wholesalers and other online travel businesses.
• OTAs - The five major OTAs (online travel agencies) are Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Orbitz, Hotwire. Lodging properties that distribute rooms through the OTAs have net rate wholesale agreements. Expedia's contract with hotels require that the hotels provide 10% of their inventory (free-sale allocation) on a daily basis and that the hotel provides a net rate that is 25%-35% off the hotels best available rates. The OTAs have rate parity agreements with the hotels so that one OTA cannot sell a room cheaper than the other OTA. If you do a search on the OTAs websites, you'll notice that the nightly rate is the same between Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline and Orbitz when they display the price. So if the nightly rate is $100 you know that the OTAs are paying the hotel a net rate of $65-$75 foreach booking they make on their website for the hotel.
• FIT Wholesalers- Large wholesalers like Tourico Holiday's and Hotelbeds.com are two wholesalers that many hotels in the U.S. wholesale their rates to. Traditionally a wholesaler resells the hotel rooms to travel agents and travel agencies. Wholesalers also sell direct to consumers. Classic Vacations is an example of a wholesaler that sells direct to consumers and to travel agencies. Apple Vacations on the other and sells directly to travel agencies only and has wholesale room contracts with many hotels in the beach destination market. FIT stands for Frequent Individual Traveler or individuals, non-group travel. FIT wholesalers contract at net rates and have allocations and or pre-buy and guarantee room nights to the hotel.
• Individual Online Travel Companies or Travel Merchants- These are other online travel businesses that don't really fall into any of the above categories. The new private sale, group buying, and flash sale travel companies would fall into this category, like Jetsetter, Living Social Escapes, the new Groupon-Expedia Joint venture.
3rd Party Channel Distribution Technologies/Systems
3rd party OTAs, wholesalers and individual online travel companies use software systems, networks and software companies to connect their websites with the hotels inventory, rates and availability. There are three main ways to connect with a hotel, a switch, an extranet and manually.
• Switches - These include Pegasus Switch, SynXis, Inntopia, EZYield, LeisureLink and Barefoot Technologies. These are expensive to establish and setup, although you can add an Inntopia switch to your website fairly quickly and without a fee. A switch is a middleman that provides the service of connecting websites and travel software systems with the hotels inventory, availability and pricing.
• Extranets- An extranet is an admin area on your website, platform where your hotel and lodging partners can login (web-based) and add/delete/update their inventory, availability and pricing. Expedia and the larger OTAs all have extranets that the large hotels revenue managers manage on a daily and weekly basis.
• Manual Connectivity- The easiest and most affordable way to connect to a hotel partners inventory, availability and pricing is to receive updates via excel spreadsheets, email and phone. This is not the most efficient way but when you are just starting off it's the easiest.