If the hospitality industry cared enough it wouldn’t be hard to start their own “booking service” that didn’t have the flaws of Expedia and crew and gave the majority of the money back to the hotels. Upkeeping a website isn’t that hard.
I absolutely agree with you 100%. I think that one of the main problems is that the industry is divided between large international chains and small mom-and-pop places, and there’s no central trade/certification/professional organization that all of them belong to the way there is for the music (RIAA, ASCAP) or medical (AMA) industries. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it makes it harder to organize something like that with large scale participation.
Asking me not to compare prices and call the hotel directly on the phone so I can pay whatever price they feel like is similar to asking me to go back to horse and buggy.
Agreed. Personally, I use TripAdvisor and a couple other websites to do my research and decide on a place, so I normally only end up making one phone call. It’s also worth noting that I’m the type of person who would rather speak with a human being than fill out a form, but that’s just me.
Well, the place I’m at now, we actually encourage people to shop around. Again, though, we make it a point to compete over quality rather than price.
What you end up with though, is a situation where competetors get into bidding wars to offer the lowest price- I’m charging $99, so you charge $89, so I drop to $79, and sooner or later we’re both renting rooms for so little that we can’t stay in business. Much like WalMart, it’s great for the consumer in the short term, but a few years down the road you find out that you have a whole lot fewer options and they all look the same.
