Again, all I’m hearing is “I don’t want to pay what something is worth”, and “But WalMart is great for consumers!”
(PS, remind me never to retain you when I’m brought in by creditors to downsize your establishment.)
Right. Here’s the thing: Deep discounts are a serious sign of a business that can’t get people in any other way. Out of the 8 properties I’ve worked for, a couple were nearing bankruptcy, and a couple were able to run at over 90% capacity and able to give the employees raises every year. Want to guess which ones offered those steep discounts? Want to guess who I work for now?
Right now, BTW, our Expedia rate currently saves you four dollars off our rack rate. You’d do better just by having AAA. We’re #1 on TripAdvisor and sold out the past two weekends- In both cases, doing much better than the local Hilton or Marriot affiliates.
We rely on repeat customers. They pay what we’re worth, and they keep coming back. If you want to patronize establishments that are that desperate to get people through the door, that’s your business. We aren’t, and we’re not willing to play the bidding war game, because we don’t need to- And the biggest reason is that we never started playing it in the first place.
The deep-cut middlemen hurt the industry. Period. They don’t provide the goods or the service, they only aggregate information. Now that’s definitely a service that might be worth paying for, but not to the tune of half the industry’s profits. That translates into real lost jobs and benefits for a hell of a lot of people. You can support that if you want to, but you’re making the overall financial clusterfuck of our economy worse, not better, by doing so.
