Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Dodgy adverts

Ken, I will explain it to you tomorrow, suffice to say that it was an advert in Scotland in the 60's, for a sweet bar.

I will await the explanation, with interest

Really it is only a sweet bar.

Glad to see you're doing that Peter about booking direct. When the hotel booking sites first came out they hammered out how much cheaper the equivalent hotel room would be booking thought their comparison site than direct with the hotel. Bearing in mind that a hotel owner can be charged anything between 15 to 22% commission to the booking agent it doesn't take long to realise who is benefitting from this. Furthermore, in many countries including the UK these online booking platforms have a parity clause in them meaning that the hotel owner has to guarantee the booking platform that they do not sell the identical rooms at any different price.

If you deal direct with a hotel they may get round this by offering free upgrades etc. We, along with many other holiday cottage/villa owners in the last three months have been battling against the Owners Direct/Homeaway/VRBO platform that worked very well fr many years by us paying a considerable amount of money to advertise on their platform on return for communicating directly with prospective property renters.

Since Expedia bought them out last year and are now changing their website ultimately to be for online bookings only and bypassing direct contact with the property owners they have implemented a "Service Charge Fee" adding 9% on to the cost of a holiday that goes direct to Expedia via an unregulated company in The Republic of Ireland. This can add up to £300 to the cost of a holiday. It as reported on NASDAQ that in two years time this should bring Expedia's shareholders a bunce of just under $1bn for doing nothing. It is being 'sold' on the basis it is providing payment protection to people who make card payments online through this system but this is untrue due to the payment company being unregulated. Payments taken through owners card facilities, such as ourselves, are protected in the UK by our own banks.

In a long and roundabout way I want to thank you again, Peter, for booking direct your hotel accommodation as it will be much appreciated by the owners and you will benefit too. We are working with other holiday cottage/villa owners to promote the hashtag #bookdirect in social media as people do not realise how they are paying a high price for the convenience of seeing a selection of places to stay on one platform.

I'll get of my and apologise for hijacking the thread.

Not sure that I see anything dodgy about it. And 5 secs after changing tab, I cant remember what it was promoting. certainly didnt say anything about the benefits of the product.

Fatuous marketing nonsense.

I do the same thing as Peter re bookings. Always direct with the hotel.

For personal travel we do the same.
Fortunately, I haven't done any overnight business travel for years - the company insists we use their approved booking agent, even though I have found booking direct with a hotel could be up to 20% cheaper...

As Hotel negotiations are part of my remit, we get feedback all the time that the traveller can book online through a cheap website cheaper than our negotiated rate. We disallow this, as they do not see the hidden costs such as cancellations or + parking or + wireless. all these and other charges we include in our negotiations. we don't include breakfast as 60% of travellers don't eat it every day in the hotel, so why should we pay for it. Hotels booked outside our system also don't allow us to negotiate the best prices as bed night totals are incorrect.

We used to use an agency and still do for events and large bookings where they work welll but we stopped it for single room nights. We have everyone a budget and allowed them to pay over if they wanted to. We then did a monthly scrape to see where we stood. We got a few escalations and requests but it worked well with an internal TripAdvisor market developing for most of our offices.

Sometimes the agency would save €20 on the room only to find the taxi in the morning was twice this. The benefit of being able to book a posh room and take the missus but claim back the base rate got us a little love.