HRS discovers hotel reviews (bless them!)

Whist reading e-tid, I have read that HRS have discovered the importance of hotel reviews to boost sales. Well, it's about time! Venere, Booking.com, TripAdvisor have understood this a long time ago.

One of HRS board member Michael Simon reveals ‘After the price, the rating is the most important decision-making criteria for choosing a hotel – this means that excellent ratings boost sales.’ WOW!! Really? Thanks for that. It looks like HRS is catching up with its direct competitors.

Also I am still puzzled about why the German online hotel specialist still shouts about having 230,000 hotels. I have always had doubt about this number and think some hotels are duplicate. But I might be wrong. There is no way we can check this out as a consumer while visiting their website.

As a comparison, on a date in August, HRS features 350 hotels while Booking.com has more than 600 hotels available...

Comments

[Xavier]

Don't they include the hotels they can reach trough GDS?

[Hotel Internet Marketing]

Seems a bit out of context e-tid posting this as HRS has provided ratings and reviews for quite some time (if i remember correctly before travelres' hotel.de, so at least for two years now) and it's one of their criteria for properties to be listed in the newsletters.

whilst 230.000 hotels seems like a lot, there are switches out there that give you access to over 260.000 properties with next to no duplicates after mapping them. Obviously, some of these 'hotels' are home stays, guesthouses and hostels - but it adds up.

[Aldo]

As to the big numbers, all these big companies think that way, everything is a number (I am not trying to criticise, it is understandable because of their sheer size), that is why they provide little or no customer service. Don't forget that there are also small company in the reservation business that can provide a much better service, simply because they are small. Ok, I have a vetted interest as a small business owner in saying this, but I can assure you it is true. Check out our hotels in Rome www.hotelschart.com/rome

[Samuel Peterson]

I agree with Aldo that numbers are not only the reason & specialty, if u doesn’t provide good services to your costumers than its nothing to have a big name or business.

[Tony]

I've seen you were talking about update on HRS and I was wondering if you could check out a new system to find hotels I've created where hotels can directly add their own rates on my site, withoud any commitions fees.

I've seen than booking on a third part site can make you get highest rates than booking directly on the hotel's sites. So I wanted to create a new system where everybody could get the same price as we would have had by booking directly with the hotel

The site still in BETA. So please don't blame me in you're getting into any weird bug :-p

http://www.lookotel.com/france_ile%20de%20france_paris_c782194_Paris+Hotels

As this is still a BETA version, I only have hotel in Paris for the moment and if you could take just 2 minutes to send me on my mail (contact@lookotel.com) any feedback, I'll be greatfull.

[Guillaume Thevenot]

@ Xavier: I believe HRS connects with hotels through Pegasus but also have direct contracts with hotels and hotel groups

@ Hotel Internet Marketing: if you know any Switch company who can connect to 260,000 hotels please let me know !!! I am curious.

@ Aldo: of course every niche market specialist could provide a better service than a company who can provide a global reach of hotels

@ Tony: I will certainly check out your venture, might take some time to get to a review though. My back log of companies to review is getting big (150 emails with such enquiry)

[dammers]

i would also be v interested to know which switches would give you access to more than 260k hotels! The world's largest and only true switch (pegs) give access to c85k properties..

aggregating hotel content..on a request basis can be done for sure but i really doubt that they have 260k hotels instantly available either thru switches or thru extranet...

to add to that, the 3 top gdss would have more or less the same content, give or take so if you add up 3 GDs and Pegs content you would still end up on a vast amount of duplicate content...

Anyway Hotel Internet Marketing seems to know which switches gives such a content so I look forward to hearing from him.

[dammers]

by the way it seems to be a german thing to add content above 200k hotels...our friends at hotel.de claim a 210k mark!

[Tony]

@ Guillaume : I understand you're very busy but thanks for the answer, i really appreciate