Hotels own website.
The vast majority of Hotels (except big brand name hotels) have what is called a booking engine from an outside provider. What is a booking engine? It is the part where you can see the rooms & price and make the booking.
When you make a booking on most hotel websites you will see at the end the booking deposit. This is what the booking engine provider charges the hotel for using their booking system. Usually it is around 3%. Let’s say for this exercise your room is costing €100. The booking engine fee now called the deposit = €3. You pay balance off €97 to the hotel. The hotel takes the €3 hit for the booking.
One or two booking engines providers charge a credit card servicing fee which you will not see until the end of the booking process. In this case a €100 now becomes €102. This really annoys me. The 3% should include the credit card charge I feel. In all cases the Deposit is non refundable. Before you shout at the person at the hotel remember they do not get this 3% the booking engine providers do.
3rd party hotel sites
Let’s look at Expedia/Hotels.com, Lastminute.com & 1800hotels.
These sites charge up to 25% commission if they give a hotel a booking. €100 now becomes €75 to the hotel. One important fact is that these sites take the full amount from the guest (€100) after the guest departs the hotel invoices the website for €75. I am not saying this is wrong it is a fact of life & the guest has still paid €100 for the room. The hotel may never have got this booking on their own. Is 25% commission to much? That is a debate for another date. To be fair a lot of these sites use affiliates. If the booking comes in via an affiliate site then the 25% commission is now split 2 ways. Again if you need to cancel don’t shout at the hotel. You must cancel with the 3rd party site. They charge you and then the hotel charges them.
Watch out for hidden taxes. Expedia were in Court in the U.S for having a reservation service charge. I would think that 25% is enough of a charge?
There are other sites that charge less commission. Let’s take the Irish site Gulliver.ie They charge 10% commission up front. €100 = €10 non refundable deposit = €90 owed to hotel at checkout.
My personal non hotel website favourite is booking.com. I do not have any involvement here. They do not take the €100 from the guest. What happens is the Hotel takes the €100 and then sends the €25 commission to booking.com once the guest has departed. Why is this handy? During the days I did not have a credit card I used a friends card to make a booking. I then paid cash at the hotel. I got to use his card and as I paid cash he did not get charged.
One Response to “Making Sense of booking hotels online”
Leave a Reply
[...] hotelconsult.ie » Blog Archive » Making Sense of booking hotels online http://www.hotelconsult.ie/making-sense-of-booking-hotels-online – view page – cached #hotelconsult.ie RSS Feed hotelconsult.ie » Making Sense of booking hotels online Comments Feed hotelconsult.ie Finding a Hotel Deal Irish Hotels Montenotte Hotel Cork Twitter Sale — From the page [...]