Tag Archives: OTAs

FHRAI has initiated #GoDirect campaign requesting patrons to book their hotel stays #BookDirect or order their food directly from restaurants #OrderDirect. This is in order to eliminate intermediaries and reduce the burden of exorbitant commissions levied by online travel aggregators (OTAs) and food service aggregators (FSAs).

The Federation of Hotels & Restaurants Association of India (FHRAI), along with its regional associations, met four representatives from MakeMyTrip to discuss reduction of the commission charged by the OTAs to 15-18 per cent. The meeting was attended by Surendra Jaiswal, President, HRANI and Vice President, FHRAI, along with Garish Oberoi, Immediate Past President, FHRAI and Treasurer, HRANI. Also present at the meeting were Gurbaxish Singh Kohli, President, HRAWI, along with some of the Executive Committee members. Another points discussed in the meeting include ceasing discretionary positioning and self-rating by properties since they have no authority to rate hotels or mention star ratings based on reviews; no predatory pricing and no further discount on rooms without consent of hotels. Apart from it, the association wants that discounting on rooms and its display will be done after the express consent of the hotel and not via the extranet. Several other points raised in the meeting included the service charge on hotel room booking to be rephrased and given a different nomenclature to avoid taxation issues for the hotel, the burden of the loyalty points and discounts passed to their guests to be borne by them from the commission and not to be passed to hotels, a full break-up of pricing in case rate is displayed with full board, commission to be levied on room only and the component of food should not attract any commission, PLBs only with express agreement with hotels not blanket, PLB taxation to be borne by MMT and not the hotel and illegal hotels apartments, B&B to be immediately delisted from the portals — only legal  properties to be listed.

Amadeus has partnered with Wingify to offer Online Travel Agents (OTAs) customers access to Visual Website Optimiser (VWO), the company’s A/B testing and conversion optimisation platform. The platform helps customers analyse how consumers interact with their website and make data-driven decisions. This will help improve conversion rates at every touch point within their travel website and ultimately optimise the look-to-book ratio, a crucial part in securing more bookings through their site. Today, online travel is bigger than ever, with 148.3 million travel bookings made over the Internet each year.  India-based Wingify is one of the world’s top three software providers that specialise in A/B testing and conversion optimisation. A/B testing is a process that compares two versions of a webpage to determine which one performs better for a defined conversion goal. VWO, Wingify’s A/B testing and conversion optimisation platform, has been used in various use cases, delivering strong results to organisations across diverse industries including Virgin Holidays, KPMG, Samsung and Toyota. Sparsh Gupta, CTO of VWO, said, “Website testing and optimisation can be a significant differentiator for companies in highly competitive markets, such as the travel industry in Asia Pacific. An A/B testing and optimisation programme helps OTAs get a better understanding of how consumers engage with their websites, so businesses can pinpoint where customers are dropping off along the online purchasing journey. By using the insights and proven statistical results to address the leaks and improve their websites, businesses can see returns in the form of higher conversion rates and increased revenue.” Sebastien Gibergues, Global Head of Online Travel at Amadeus, said, “We are committed to adding greater business value for our OTA customers, by equipping them with the …