Micronet

Online Travel Agents

Agents are a Necessary Evil!

Every hotelier hates giving big discounts to offline travel agents and paying big commissions to Online Travel Agents (OTA). Discounts and Commissions on bookings often range from 10% to 30% or even more. Agents, especially OTA, make huge profits for doing very little, whereas the hotelier works very hard to make a meagre profit. This is especially true in competitive Siem Reap.

There are scores of OTA out there. All of them are ready to give you a free account on their system and allow you to configure your hotel and add your rates and inventory. However, only a few OTA market their brand effectively and so many of them fail to deliver bookings. Registering with a handful of top OTA can be beneficial, but certainly not every OTA that makes contact with you.

Hoteliers should also be aware that there is continuing amalgamation of OTA's which means that many OTA's, e.g. expedia.com and elong.com are, in fact, the same company, so hotels only need to register with the parent company and the hotel will be automatically listed on several websites.

Registering usually means asking for an account (login name and password), which can then be used to upload your hotel contact details, room types, amenities and descriptions, hotel facilities, photos, rates and inventory. Getting it right is important but it's not so easy, plus it's very time-consuming. Only register with the big OTAs or ones which are successful at catering to your niche market.

Registering with too many OTAs will consume a lot of your time initially, but it will also consume a lot of time on an ongoing basis due to rate and inventory changes. Additionally, the more OTA channels that you register with, the greater the chance of inconsistencies.

You may wish to consider use of channel manager software to make rate and inventory updates easier.

Some Property Management Systems (PMS) provide an Internet Booking Engine which can be integrated with channel management software to provide a very professional and easy-to-maintain system.

Our professional staff can register your hotel with the top OTA's as well as linking the OTA's with channel manager software and recommending a suitable PMS.

Contact Us Today for further advice and assistance.