OTA's are online travel agencies like Expedia that sell travel products directly to consumers but act as intermediaries, making money by taking a percentage of the sale. Hoteliers view OTA's as competition since OTA's can dictate prices without considering hotel costs. Last moment booking apps allow discounts on unsold hotel rooms if booked last minute, saving money for guests and maximizing hotel occupancy. Direct bookings made through a hotel's website without intermediaries are most profitable for hotels since no commission is paid. SEO helps hotels rank higher in search engines to attract more bookings. Channel management controls and optimizes bookings across websites to align hotel room prices. Roomkey is a website that allows booking hotel rooms directly with the hotel with

1. Final Exam / Semester 1
Online Business Development
Chabrier-Langenfeld Guillaume
MBA2B

2. Exercise 1
OTAs: for Online Travel Agencies (like Expedia, voyages-
sncf.com…) companies (travel agencies) using the web in
order to sell their products. Products can be hotel
nights, flight tickets, rental cars vouchers, packages… They
are selling the product directly to the consumer, but they
are just intermediaries. They are making money by taking a
certain percentage on the product they are selling, trying to
reduce the price they are buying to the professional in
order to make it more profitable for them. Hoteliers and
travel professionals are now in sort of a war with
them, because OTA’s have kind of a power because they are
huge and represent for a lot of hoteliers one of the major
ways to sell their rooms. So OTA’s can fix the price they
want without taking care of hoteliers needs/costs.

3. Last moment booking apps: (like hoteltonight.com) apps
that allows you to have discount prices on rooms if you
book at the last moment. The later you book, the cheaper
the price will be. It is like a game, you accept to wait for
the last moment to book a room to have the best
price, but in return you also accept that if you miss the
opportunity, you will have to choose another hotel with
rooms available. It is a good way to save money for the
guest but also for hoteliers, because instead of letting
empty rooms, you can sell them in order to maximise your
occupancy rate.

4. Direct bookings: are bookings made directly on the hotel
website, without intermediaries. It is the most profitable
way for hotelier to sell the rooms as without
intermediaries, the hotelier does not have to leave a
commission to OTA’s or booking engines. It has to be
privileged by hoteliers in order to maximise revenues and
increase the ADR (average daily rate) and the RevPAR
(Revenue per available rooms).

5. SEO: for Search Engine Optimization, are ways and
practices helping you to be top ranked in free Search
Engines like Google or Yahoo. By working on your SEO, your
brand or website will be more visible to people when
searching on those Search Engine websites. For a hotel the
main interest is like for example when you type down
“boutique hotel alsace”, your hotel will appear on the top
of the page. People will then more often look at your
website and book your rooms instead of booking your
competitors ones.

6. Channel management: are the control and the
optimization of your bookings through specialized websites
like fastbooking or ratetiger. The aim of those application is
for the hotelier to control the price he sells his rooms on
every websites he his selling (OTA’s, booking sites…). The
application is giving you dates when you want to sell your
rooms, on which channel (which website) and at what
price. It is an helpful tool to align prices between the
different channels you are working with.

7. Roomkey
Roomkey is a website or application which
allows you to look for hotels, and book rooms
directly to the hoteliers with no hidden fees. It
is working like a hotel booking website
(hotels.com or even booking.com)