Articles tagged “booking holdings”

Will Booking.com be as good at business services for hotels as it is for selling their rooms, and will a move into enterprise services for hotels be a huge distraction? We are about to find out.

While the national average room rate may be $137, along with everyone claiming the economy is nearly back to normal, more than half of the top cities have lower averages. This reflects the continuing economic recovery and hotels trying to get guests in the door, meaning it's still a great time to find hotel deals.

HotelTonight's marketing team likes to play up spontaneity as a prime booking motivator, but this data suggests that users are in need of reasonably priced rooms without the bells and whistles.

In the short term, we'll probably see a divide between the booking (Ostrovok.ru) and metasearch sites (Hipmunk) that will partner with Airbnb, and the more conservative ones that won't. The holdouts will eventually come around.

Hotel site Getaroom.com tried to drive consumers from its Web site to a call centers for up-selling, but the much larger CheapOair is intent on doing both -- perfecting online booking and giving travelers that option, but also prodding them to phone agents in its company-owned call centers.

Steve Singh is one of the most-forward-looking CEOs in the travel industry, and Concur's $150 million Perfect Trip Fund is actively investing in that vision.

The Priceline Group is moving much closer to Ctrip with a minority stake and CEO Darren Huston points to a series of additional moves in China in the next few years. Ctrip, though, hasn't always played well with other partners so it remains to be seen whether familial relations between these new second cousins will be long-standing.

Most travel tech people don't see the opportunity for better hotel booking and reservations management coming from the restaurant industry -- as the response to OpenTable purchase demonstrated. This is the next great opportunity for startups in travel.

Expedia's strategy is worth a shot: Focus on hotels and other core products while competitors the Priceline Group and TripAdvisor play around with restaurant reservations, and tours and activities. If Expedia sticks to its focus-on-what-we-got strategy, it is a huge gamble.

Having hard proof that Rocketrip's product influences employee behavior will be a major selling point for the startup and inform its incentive system.