The imposition of dynamic pricing will break the hotel-corporate partnership, a leading travel manager warned.
Yves Galimidi, head of global travel purchases for IKEA, said the two sides currently had a good relationship but “I am afraid that we will lose it” if dynamic pricing was imposed.
He was speaking at a joint conference of the Belgian Association of Travel Management and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) in Brussels.
Damaging hotel-corporate relations was one of 11 reasons he opposed dynamic pricing.
Among the others were difficulty in assessing hotel spend and individual budgets, it was one sided in favour of hotels, there was no transparency, hotels were not the same as airlines which had long used dynamic pricing, corporate business was not the same as leisure and last room availability was fundamental for companies.
"Hotels are coming to us with a nice slant – with beautiful graphics, data and numbers. But I am still not able to calculate my spend for next year which is very annoying.
"I am still unable to project my budget for the next year on hotels. I can not do that with dynamic pricing," he said.
Earlier Russell Green, director of corporate sales EMEA for InterContinental Hotels Group, said it was currently a seller's market for hotels and that dynamic pricing was “very market sensitive.”
He added: "One good thing about it is that if you do it right, it works very well. It enables the appropriate value to be reached and applies revenue management principles proactively."
Later in the debate, Mr Green said that if hotel chains tried to impose dynamic pricing, corporates should tell them to go away.
"I am ready to make a good business case for it but if it is not compelling, you will do what is right for you and I would support that.
"If we are in this for the long term, we will not pitch rates high in a bull market.
"We don't want to bust the relationship with you anymore than you want to bust it with us."
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BA "disappointed" by Open Skies deal
BA was "very disappointed" by the recent Open Skies deal between the US and the EU, one of its senior executive said.
Carlos Carbonell-Bamford, senior sales manager for corporates sales, said Europe had “given the Americans all they wanted” but in return "the US yielded us no meaningful concessions."
Mr Carbonell-Bamford was speaking at a joint Belgian Association of Travel Management (BATM) and Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) conference in Brussels.
He told the 80 delegates that BA had consistently argued for the removal of restrictions "which have stifled competition for many years."
He cited the liberalisation of aviation is Europe in the 1990s as creating new routes, new markets and new opportunities.
"The Open Skies deal was not what we were hoping for," he said with the main omission being the continued inability of foreign airlines to take control of US carriers.
"We at BA hoped that it would create a catalyst for consolidation. The reality was very disappointing."
He said the main opportunity the deal offered was the chance to fly between Europe and US cities.
Mr Carbonell-Bamford confirmed that BA would be starting a series of new services from key continental cites to the US. These would include Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt and Milan and the US city would be the "obvious choice" of New York.
But he said the airline had not yet decided whether the flights would be all business class.
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