The Disappointing Life of Hotel Industry Booking Site Room Key

If you ever scroll all the way down to the bottom of the home pages for Choice Hotels, Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), Marriott, or Wyndham, there's a slight chance you may notice a link to something called Room Key. Or, if you happen to be looking for a room on any of those sites, but decide you're not ready to hit the "book" button and leave the site, there's a chance a new screen will pop under, directing you to RoomKey.com. Still not sure what Room Key is? You're probably not alone in that regard, and that's one of the biggest problems with its business: a major lack of brand awareness. Room Key, launched in January 2012, is the brainchild of six major hotel chains — Choice, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, and Wyndham. When it debuted, its inaugural press release described Room Key as "an innovative new online hotel search engine that will provide the simplicity, transparency and breadth of choice consumers expect from a search engine, while delivering the flexibility, accuracy and assurance consumers expect from the hospitality industry." In other words, it was the hotel industry's answer to the rise of the online travel agency (OTA), similar to how the airlines launched Orbitz in 2001. But unlike an OTA like Expedia or Booking.com, hotel-chain-owned Room Key would charge lower commissions. It also wouldn't be biased in its search results, and it would give each of the founding hotel owners direct business in the form of leads from Room Key to their websites. "The notion that the industry would create its own travel portal so we can be less dependent on OTAs was an immensely appealing idea at that time, and it still is," David Kong, Best Western CEO told Skift. Best Western, while not a founding hotel partner in Room Key, signed on as its first commercial partner a few days after the site's launch. Since then, however, Kong hasn't been very impressed with the site's performance. "It's a very small fraction of our business, nowhere close to what the initial estimates were," Kong said. "In that regard, it's a bit disappointing. It was created by all the major brands in the industry. You'd think we would know how to do it and do it well, but it hasn't panned out that way." Room Key Today "We behave like an OTA in terms of the search process and we sell like a meta," is how Room Key CEO Steve Sickel, who took over from founding CEO John F. Davis II in 2014, described the site. Davis declined to be intervie