Rapid changes in the hotel market is making it more difficult for corporates to get good deals, Jean-Michel Kadaner, president of Key Corporate Solutions told a meeting of the Belgian Association of Travel managers (BATM).
Mr Kadaner said hotels were adopting different price structures and more channels for booking were also now available. At the same time, the market was “hardening” with prices likely to rise by 5%-7% this year, he said.
More than 50 delegates attended the forum on Hotel Distribution Challenges at the Corinthia Hotel, Antwerp.
Mr Kadaner said that on pricing, hotels used yield management, revenue management and dynamic pricing.
The old model of companies buying their rooms through agents which used the Central Reservation System (CRS) was being superseded by the arrival of new booking channels including direct online bookings and aggregators.
Mr Kadaner said it left companies with a choice of booking themselves which cost time, using a travel agent which might involve a conflict of interest, going to an independent agent who would charge but who could be more cost-effective or joining a purchasing group which could increase leverage.
Using Requests for Proposals (RFPs) companies have the chance to capture data, identify their primary locations and preferred suppliers, evaluate savings and negotiate deals with the chosen hotels.
He said best practice was to create, manage and process RFPs online including the first level of negotiation, make sure prices were net and without commission, benchmark prices against those of the agents, quantify savings and audit prices.
Nora Buysschaert, president of the BATM, said that corporates processed thousands of hotel bookings every year and there was a problem knowing whether they got the best deal from them.
She said hotels also faced “the chronic problem of hotel rate loading and what to do to get negotiated rates properly and accurately loaded and the difficulties of capturing full line item details on hotel spend which leads to huge losses of millions of Euros for the corporates.”