OTAs enquire the GDS (Global Distribution System) for the Room availability and Available Rooms at the Hotel. Hotels update their inventory in terms of room booking rate & available rooms for a certain period of time via CRS (Central Reservation system) which further reflect in GDS.
Due to technological layers & current technical architecture limitation
the listing of the Price and Rooms are not the real time as it supposed to be on OTAs, which may give an impression that OTAs are selling rooms
at a inconsistent price, which can alienate the customer experience.
The OTAs act as interface to perform window shopping with Brand hotels at initial level, they may not able to propagate the brand voice which the Hotel is signaling in terms of festive seasons or Special events.
Brand Hotels has more directed and individual touch provided their UX of booking process supports that which is not consistent for brand hotels at large. OTAs provides more robustness and varieties in selection of a particular hotel. But OTAs performs good job in increasing of Hotel Occupancy Rate ofcourse for a fee. And maintain a unified UX.
(Online Business Aggregation model)
OBA purchase specific numbers of hotels room from hotels and sell it at discount price to end user. OBAs introduces their rooms as budget rooms with standard facilities for a given room type.
Sometimes they just list the property on their site and if the sell is done for the room listing, the revenue is shared with hotels. OYO Rooms, Zo Rooms and 16 startups launched in 2014-15 who follow this business model. OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms are in neck to neck competition with each other. Infact, there is a news regarding OYO is planning to buy ZO Rooms is also been heard. Based on this new market opportunity existing OTAs (Make MyTrip, Cleartrip and ibibo are also launching the budget rooms in their segment.
By Gaurav Mishra
