The Carlson Rezidor Group, which includes brands such as Radisson and Park Inn has this week become the latest hotel group to announce it will be targeting hotel guests through its loyalty programme.
The company has announced the launch of Members Only Rate which gives guests who are members of its Club Carlson Rewards loyalty programme 10% off Best Available Rate on hotels booked on Carlson Rezidor Hotels brand websites, mobile sites and apps.
The launch of the new initiative follows similar schemes from Hilton, IHG and Choice and Hyatt. The direct to guest initiatives have been seen as a response to the growing dominance of online travel agents and the increasingly high commissions they have been charging hotels.
The initiatives are likely to see the chains' loyalty programmes grow even faster than they have already. The first such schemes were those launched by Holiday Inn and Marriott in the early 1980s but they are now a staple of the industry, with millions of travellers as members.
Our chart this week shows the number of members of each of the major programmes.
What may be more interesting is looking to the future. With more information on their guests and better relationships with them, we may see a move away from across the board discounts on BAR. Big data crunching will enable hotels to get far more sophisticated about how much discount they are willing to give certain individuals or groups of individuals, say corporate travellers. We may have only seen the very start of what could be an enormous change to the industry.