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12 Reasons Not to Use Third Party Online Sales Channels, by Disgruntled Hotelier
I received an email from a hotelier yesterday, who has just decided to stop using any online sales channels. He wrote 12 reasons why he was 'sick to the back teeth of them' and asked if I'd like to use them for the blog. I duly obliged, and got to work at once deleting his swear words and typos! Thanks Mr Anonymous, I was going to write about bedding today!
Mr Anonymous calls the sales channels 'CC-OTA's' for Commission Charging Online Travel Agents.
1. If a guest wants to cancel or re-arrange a booking I hate the fact that someone else is dealing with them. I can't rely on another company's customer support to treat my customer right, especially if they're on the other side of the planet.
2. When a CC-OTA loses any of my potential customers before the final click you can't track them, with Analytics etc. I could be losing 75% of punters just before the last click and wouldn't be any the wiser. I can track that on my own site with Google Analytics easily.
3. They pushed my price down to the lowest common denominator in my local area. Competing on price alone is for mugs.
4. They take up to 15% of my rate - which can be as much as 80% of my profit in an average month.
5. The way my place looked on their pages was just amateur and I felt it devalued everything we are trying to offer with the business.
6. I often got email/fax confirmations from CC-OTA's up to 30 minutes late, which has often lead to double bookings.
7. It won't integrate seamlessly with my own online booking system, which leads to lots of messing around and manual time wasting.
8. I have been experimenting with adwords and am fairly confident that if I spent half the money I saved in commission on Ad-words promotion and mail-shots I'd sell more rooms at full prices.
9. Having a third party run my business made me lazy, it made me focus on selling the sausage, not the sizzle!
10. Some customers are starting to see that the 'dynamic' pricing that I had to use with channels was a rip off. They say 'why have you got six different rates?' I don't want my customers to hate me like some low cost airlines.
11. The customers CC-OTA's attract sometimes, are not my kind of customers because they've booked on price alone. They have been known to upset my regular customers.
12. CC-OTA customers tend to spend much less in the bar and restaurant.
