Ian Clayton, AXSES SCI
There are hundreds of Travel sites that now offer on line booking services. Most are Internet Travel Agents who will book hotels, car rental or other tourism services, taking bookings for a commission. Some charge setup fees and subscriptions, while others do not. Sites like TravelWeb, Hotel Reservations Network, Travelocity, The Internet Hotel Group, and Travelscape, are well known and can generate additional business. They are worth investigating and listing with, if you can spare the time to manage the on-line inventory and set up the systems. We are preparing a list of these services for you to check out. See them soon at: http://barbados.org/marketwatch/olrssites.htm
Having hundreds and soon thousands of these services to choose from is good. Its good to have competition and choice. However, all this choice has a down side that I will try to shed some light on, remembering that the present situation can only get more labour intensive and complicated.
Maintaining on line inventories with several OLRS is difficult. The systems are different. There are different forms and policies. There are different options. There are different ways to describe rooms, rates, specials, packages and trade discounts etc. If you choose to be on several systems, you will have to maintain several room allocations, rate sheets, features and trade discounts etc, and learn to operate several different inventory systems.
It is not easy to run a single OLRS let alone several.
Here is what it entails. You allocate rooms or blocks of rooms to the OLRS. You fill out forms for each room or block and enter in a description, rates, features, location, specials, discounts, approved agents and tour operators, trade arrangements etc. Then you allocate availability: this can be by day or period, for each room or room type. It can be free allocation, which means unlimited rooms are available unless you block them off, or you can allocate specific rooms of a certain type for a specified length of time, say 5 rooms of type1 for all or some days of the year. Once you get used to how to do this on one OLRS, then you figure out how to use another, which maybe has more options or does not have the options you need for special holiday packages etc. Now you have to keep all of them up to date. You change your room rates, close off a section and bingo, that means accessing all those OLRS and making the changes in all those systems.
So why would you want to do this?. Well it makes good business sense if they are bringing you additional bookings. And it appears that they will have a growing impact. However, reservations from independent OLRS and Internet Travel Agents account for less than 0.5% of all hotel bookings. By 2001 over 84% of hotel bookings will still be off-line (booking by fax and telephone as in the past).
We suspect adoption of on-line reservations will be progressive but not explosive. They appeal to a market segment that is growing, but most travelers like the flexibility of dealing by emails or in person. They like to ask questions, get impressions, arrange specific accommodations and facilities and select the dates based on other travel arrangements. The OLRS is to some extent a straight jacket, that requires precise choice and offers few alternatives. Hotels are not a commodity; people need to know more.
So what is the rush? We need to gear up with a better option, not jump into technology for its own sake.
Currently hotels with their own website and OLRS account for 80% of all on-line bookings. That means that all those big portals are getting only a small share of the on-line bookings. In addition the hotels own website influences many traditional bookings. The hotel's own site is the most vital single marketing medium, so long as it is visible. It is very important to keep the websites up to date and to use appropriate technology.
At http://barbados.org we now have several OLRS options to choose from. We can supply http://barbados.org accommodation partners with a choice of OLRS options. In the future the AXSES OLRS will include all tourism operators including; tours, scuba diving, accommodation and all tourism activities.
More importantly we plan to develop NEW Technology to manage OLRS allocations. This will provide a standard and consistent way to allocate inventories to the major OLRS. As the big portals get more popular and spend immense sums of money promoting their services, they will become more influential. It will be important to be linked from or listed with many of them. Just how and when this is done is the critical issue:
To Find out about AXSES OLRS plans and options please email iclayton@axses.net. We are pleased to have your suggestions and opinions about this important subject.
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