Post by khatunrita309 on Mar 11, 2024 3:36:11 GMT
Rate parity clauses don't have an easy life these days: even in Austria the government is fighting to remove it from contracts between tourist portals and hotels. Even if Austria - perhaps together with Italy - succeeded in its aim, hotels across half of Europe would be out of the grip of rate parity and perhaps could agree on more advantageous solutions with the portals. As Reuters reports , Austria “launched a new law on Tuesday 19 July to prevent travel portals from banning hotels from selling their rooms at lower prices on their sites, as France and Germany have already done . ” After a week of debate, Austrian Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economy Reinhold Mitterlehner declared that the government has sent to parliament the proposal to make a change to the current legislature to prevent the obligation of rate parity. The decision is postponed until after the summer. All this to give Austrian hotels more leeway with their prices. In reality, Austria is one of the very first states to have moved to do something against equal rate obligations: the Association of Austrian Hoteliers (OHV) had made the first complaints against this contractual obligation.
in 2012 to the federal court, but without get results. At the time HRS was the counterparty, but over the years the situation has changed and today Booking.com monopolizes the Austrian portal market . So in January the OHV was ready to get involved again. Evidently the government has not remained indifferent to this round and has accepted the invitation to intervene. At the center of the storm in this case too is Booking.com , which has vigorously defended price parity by declaring that this practice is the only one that guarantees transparency to customers: "If you wanted to be sure of finding the lowest price Industry Email List you would be forced to go from one page to another so that, at the end of the games, only a small part of the possible offers appears.” Abolishing the obligation of equal tariffs will not be enough to disintermediate As we have seen, many things are changing at an international level and rate parity, which until yesterday was an incontrovertible constraint, today seems on the verge of decline . A decline that would make OTAs face the fact that things are changing and that there is a need to find new forms of collaboration with hotels that bring advantages to both parties. Even in America , large hotel chains such as Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton have launched campaigns to encourage direct bookings which.
would have been unthinkable. Of course, it is undeniable that tourist portals in Europe still have the upper hand , because the vast majority of independent hotels, if they lost visibility on Expedia or Booking.com, would have great difficulty selling all their inventory directly. A recently released HOTREC study shows that, out of 2000 hotels surveyed in Europe, dependence on OTAs is increasing and that in 2015 one in four nights came from an intermediary. The average level of disintermediation is around 55%. Booking.com holds 60% of the market, followed by Epedia and HRS. HOTREC maintains that in this state of affairs it is essential that market conditions become more correct and balanced, giving hotels the possibility to establish their conditions freely. Having said this, it would be pure utopia to think that the abolition of the obligation to maintain rate parity is the only key to disintermediation . If there is no concrete change in the mentality, in the distribution strategy and in the investments made by the structures to make the most of the direct channel , the changes in rate parity will hardly produce the effects hoped for by hoteliers.
in 2012 to the federal court, but without get results. At the time HRS was the counterparty, but over the years the situation has changed and today Booking.com monopolizes the Austrian portal market . So in January the OHV was ready to get involved again. Evidently the government has not remained indifferent to this round and has accepted the invitation to intervene. At the center of the storm in this case too is Booking.com , which has vigorously defended price parity by declaring that this practice is the only one that guarantees transparency to customers: "If you wanted to be sure of finding the lowest price Industry Email List you would be forced to go from one page to another so that, at the end of the games, only a small part of the possible offers appears.” Abolishing the obligation of equal tariffs will not be enough to disintermediate As we have seen, many things are changing at an international level and rate parity, which until yesterday was an incontrovertible constraint, today seems on the verge of decline . A decline that would make OTAs face the fact that things are changing and that there is a need to find new forms of collaboration with hotels that bring advantages to both parties. Even in America , large hotel chains such as Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton have launched campaigns to encourage direct bookings which.
would have been unthinkable. Of course, it is undeniable that tourist portals in Europe still have the upper hand , because the vast majority of independent hotels, if they lost visibility on Expedia or Booking.com, would have great difficulty selling all their inventory directly. A recently released HOTREC study shows that, out of 2000 hotels surveyed in Europe, dependence on OTAs is increasing and that in 2015 one in four nights came from an intermediary. The average level of disintermediation is around 55%. Booking.com holds 60% of the market, followed by Epedia and HRS. HOTREC maintains that in this state of affairs it is essential that market conditions become more correct and balanced, giving hotels the possibility to establish their conditions freely. Having said this, it would be pure utopia to think that the abolition of the obligation to maintain rate parity is the only key to disintermediation . If there is no concrete change in the mentality, in the distribution strategy and in the investments made by the structures to make the most of the direct channel , the changes in rate parity will hardly produce the effects hoped for by hoteliers.