Hyatt has joined Marriott and Hilton in incentivising those that choose to book directly. It is offering a discount of up to 10% to any loyalty club member that books directly through the Hyatt website or its app. These Hyatt Gold Passport discounts are available for properties in the United States, Canada and Australia.
The Hyatt discount can be applied to third party bookings but only if the booker makes the booking through either Hyatt's website or app.
The discount is in addition to other incentives and benefits for booking direct such as loyalty programme points, online check-in and express check-out.
ASTA (the American Society of Travel Agents) has come out batting for the GDS. It was quoted by Business Travel News as saying that forcing agents to use the website rather than the GDS "makes comparative shopping harder for agent and consumer alike and adds to an agent's workload by disrupting the standard booking process". This is not surprising given that travel agents all receive hefty incentive payments from their GDSs but is what's good for the TMC also good for its client?
There is no doubt that with traditional systems it is easier to capture data if bookings are all made through the same channel but in the future this is less and less likely to be the case. What constitutes business travel content is expanding all the time and corporate travel programmes are increasingly including non-GDS content such as budget hotels and low-cost airlines as well as sharing economy sites such as Uber and Airbnb. And many tools are facilitating incorporating non-traditional content into corporate systems. For example, earlier this year KDS Neo added Addison Lee, a private taxi company, to its content.
The GDS may still hold an awful lot of content and be an efficient distribution tool but the content that business travellers want is no longer exclusively on the GDS. Like Lufthansa's imposition of its DCC surcharge last year, Hyatt's move may not be convenient for TMCs but Hyatt will not be the last supplier to incentivise bookers who go direct.
- Register here to join Business Travel iQ's webinar on How travel management companies are dealing with Lufthansa's direct connect on 29 April.