A customer plans a trip to Goa and wants to stay there for a comfortable weekend getaway. He reaches your website after receiving a recommendation from a friend and proceeds to book a room. Just as he is about to pay with his credit card, his wife walks in and asks him to check out the rates on Ibibo, claiming the rates there are lower. Your customer proceeds to book a room and you end up with a much lower profit margin and have to pay a commission to the OTA as well.
Most hoteliers are no strangers to such stories. In fact, such stories are the reason why Rate Parity was introduced.
What is Rate Parity
Rate Parity requires you to maintain the same rates on every distribution channel you currently employ. So, with Rate Parity, the rates you currently display on your website need to be the same as that displayed on Ibibo or Makemytrip’s website.
What Are The Advantages of Rate Parity
In today’s world, OTAs are a necessary evil; they have the marketing manpower and the social outreach that no individual hotelier can manage. Rate Parity, however, brings you and the OTA back on a level playing field. With Rate Parity, both you and the OTA need to charge the exact same price for the same rooms.
- Rate Parity allows you to leverage your own marketing and social media efforts without having to lose out on a lot of traffic to your OTA’s.
- Rate parity lets you dictate the price your rooms sell for, irrespective of the platform your customers come through.
- Rate Parity also boosts your brand image; there is a reason why Apple is such a trusted and well respected brand. Consumers who see that the price you are charging is uniform across all platforms, they will begin to see you as a much more dependable brand.
- By maintaining rate parity, you also are able to preserve your relationship with the several different OTAs you employ.
- You significantly boost the number of hits and bookings you get on your own website. You also do not need to pay absurd amounts in commission to the OTAs.
How can you maintain Rate Parity
Sure, you can sign agreements with your OTAs to maintain the prices at the rates you predecide. But your own prices will rarely be constant; it’s pretty for the OTA to argue that it simply was not aware of rate hike.
You can work your way around this tiny loophole by applying a Price Monitoring Technique known as Web scraping. Web Scraping allows you to maintain in price monitoring by constantly ‘scraping’ the rates OTAs are charging for your rooms on their platforms automatically, rather than you needing to keep monitoring their websites.
You can keep track of OTAs who are defaulting on your agreements and take action against them. ITSys solutions provides Web Scraping solutions to hotels to ensure Rate Parity across all their channels
Schedule a free consult to discuss how Web Scraping Rate Parity Solution can help your hotel (Add CTA)