German Hotel Booking Giant HRS Tilts Further Toward Corporate Travel

This summer is a pivotal time for HRS, Germany's largest home-grown online travel agency and corporate hotel booking specialist. In July, the new HRS headquarters, next to Cologne's main train station, is slated to be finished. The new building will enable the 1,500-employee company to increase its Cologne staff. The fresh hiring will reflect a rebalanced set of priorities. In the German-speaking world, HRS is best known as a consumer reservations brand — with one out of every three online hotel bookings in Germany made through its portals. But the online travel agency division is only a small part of the privately held company's global operation. It's also a division that is under pressure, according to industry experts. The consumer business' percentage contribution to company revenue is believed to shrinking each year as the brand faces a fierce marketing battle against Amsterdam-based Booking.com and U.S.-headquartered Expedia. Reacting to rate parity bans The backstory: For about a decade, both HRS and Booking.com benefited from contractual rate parity clauses that required hotels to offer the online travel agencies the hotels' best rates that they were also offering on their own websites. But German government rulings in 2015 banned such clauses. Since November 2016, HRS has adapted to the new landscape by adding inventory from Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) to its listings. It sees this as a way to plug some of the gaps in pricing and availability that hotels don't offer straight to HRS. The company plans to offer its users rates and availability from multiple sources, which signals a slight move away from a "pure" online travel agency model, where HRS sourced all the rooms straight from hotels. Unlike metasearch brands like Trivago, HRS does not hand-off guests to third-parties to complete the bookings. Travelers instead continue to book on HRS sites as usual. In the case of EAN-sourced bookings, though, Expedia Inc. gets a c