Pandemic Twist Emerges on Bookings for Hotels in Tussle With Online Resellers

Several hotel groups have tried to lower costs for roughly a decade by driving more consumers to book directly. During the pandemic recovery, hoteliers have by and large continued to avoid overusing aggregators such as Expedia and Booking.com for much of their online sales. "It's personally been great to see the hotel industry overall not fall into the traps that we fell into after 9/11 and after the last financial downturn," said Jay Hubbs, vice president of advertising, marketing, innovation, and analytics at Best Western Hotel Group. The script that the hotel industry followed after the recessions of 2001 and 2008 involved becoming dependent on online travel resellers for more than 70 percent of online bookings on average. Yet many hotel companies haven't repeated that playbook of giving up share to third parties — broadly speaking, so far. That's according to industry experts speaking Monday in Dallas at HITEC, the Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition and Conference run by HFTP, the association of Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals. A few new factors have scrambled calculations related to the age-old hotel distribution balance between direct and indirect. A labor crisis has made some hotel companies shy about seeking more demand. A faltering recover