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Ebay promotes its newly signed deal with Octopus Travel

London Hotels get a nice Xmas gift before the end of the year

It's not even Christmas yet but London feels definitely Christmas with all decorations in the West End and also families picking up their Christmas trees to take them home.

Hotels can feel also very much the festive season and they have received a very welcome gift before everyone else for Christmas.

The hotel market place in London is fully booked for this weekend. Spanish people are on a bank holiday, the Dutch as well and many foreigners want to take the buying power they currently have with the Pound Sterling / Euro exchange rate.

Only a few rooms are available on hoteliers websites if you look very carefully.

What about the OTAs? Ae they any better to get you some rooms available tomorrow evening?

Expedia can fetch you double rooms in so called "Greater London" like Croydon, Sussex, Heathrow. Check out the results. Otherwise, you still can pay a £289 a night a modest room at the Holiday Inn Express in Hammersmith or try a £723.35 king double room at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower.

Available hotels are so rare in the city that the mapping facility gets you a very wide look at Greater London.

What about Booking.com (sister company of Priceline)? Well they show 24 hotels available in  London. You can find the most expensive (for that night) B&B Edward House selling their family room at £199 or you can find yourself a luxury 1 bedroom appartment from the Presidential Kensington at £450. In terms of what you can see on the map, hotels seem more central than their direct competitor but notice that they still show hotels in grey even though they are not available.

 

So from what I can gather, Central London will have to be avoided all weekend especially if you plan to do your Christmas shopping. The whole place will be packed. But you can maybe try the biggest shopping mall in Europe nearby Sheperd's Bush, the famous Westfield London. Happy Xmas shopping.

Interesting feature on Booking.com (real time web)

I have found  recently a new feature on Booking.com that was quietly introduced on their online booking engine. When you check out a specific hotel page, Booking.com is telling you how many people are also looking at the same hotel at the same time. See the black box on the right of the picture below.

Good idea, isn't it?

This feature is one example on how to use real time web meaning you display information relevant only at the time you are browsing the website (Twitter is clearly a king of this). On that example, 16 people are also looking at this page, is that a sign of popularity? Not sure. But I find this quick feature interesting.

What about if you upgrading this with telling you that 20 people booked this hotel in the last 3 hours... 

Funny competition from Venere.com

Venere.com - the leading Italian online hotel booking agent acquired by Expedia last quarter - has launched a competition and creates some buzz about this travel contest with the help of YouTube.

Exclusive - demo of Hotels.com Visualiser

Hotels.com has been working on an interesting project "The Visualiser" aiming to take the hotel search on the next level. It gives the consumer to find the right hotel based on personal criteria that will be picked in different questions/steps with just visuals. As I always say, pictures or videos say more than written words.

Hotels.com visualiser tested by Hotel-Blogs.com
Uploaded by HotelBlogs

AlphaRooms is recruiting

The UK based bedbank Alpha Rooms - founded by Jason Fry, a talented entrepreneur -  is looking urgently to fill the position of Head of Purchasing Eastern Med. This is a position available for a 6 month consultancy project, or a full time permanent role.

Ideally, AlphaRooms need someone who has Greece, Cyprus and Turkey experience in hotel contracting.

If interested send me an email at guillaume@hotel-blogs.com.

LateRooms and Booking.com available on mobiles

I have found recently that the UK leading online hotel booking engine LateRooms has constructed a special site for mobile users.  Easier to read with a cell phone screen and straight to the point. Problem is how do you find the url mobile.laterooms.com ? Is there a way when you browse the site from your mobile phone that LateRooms configures it automatically to the mobile site (meaning it recognizes the site is viewed from a cell phone).

Their direct competitor Lastminute.com has closed down the service for the time being. Was it a failure? Not enough traffic?

Then, the leader in online hotel bookings, Booking.com has made it very simple. You can't certainly beat that (destination, check in date, nb nights)

Expedia acquires Venere but what does it mean?

You've probably read the news on Tuesday, Advent International has agreed to sell Venere to Expedia for an undisclosed sum (for now).

Let's look back at the recent history of the hotel booking engine Venere.com.

Venere was founded in Rome in 1995 by 4 friends and entrepreneurs (Gianandrea Strekelj, Matteo Fago, Marco Bellaci and Renata Sarno)

Advent International is an international private equity company that believed and invested in Venere back in November 2006 to gain 60% of the company shares. This was helped by the exit of first investor Kiwi II who use to have 33% of shares back in 2000. The remaining 40% was still in the hands of the 4 founders.

Advent International and Venere decide in February 2008 to acquire for a undisclosed sum a serious competitor in Italy, WorldBy.com. This move was justified to enhance Venere portfolio of hotels by an increase of 6,000 properties with 2.5 million registered users. Worldby is also a model in terms of bringing quality pictures to the end consumer.

Today, Venere has access to 29,000 properties that use the booking engine extranet to load rates and availability. Their model is retail meaning the consumer book on Venere and pay the hotel directly at the end of his stay. Then the hotel has to pay a commission to Venere (which is probably between 10 and 15%).

With this acquisition, Expedia has enlarged their hotel offering by 10,000 properties (after de-duplicating for properties already working with both Expedia and Venere). Content is gold, certainly when you have inventory loaded on your system and where you are maybe weak in certain countries (Italy maybe).

Having said that, the model of Venere is totally different from Expedia model. Expedia is on a merchant model where consumers pay Expedia at the time of the booking and comes to the hotel with a pseudo voucher.

It would be interesting to see in the future how Expedia is going to merge Venere content in Hotels.com and all their Expedia sites. How not to confuse the consumer where 2 models are clearly different? It's probably too soon to say at this stage.

At this stage, I would say Venere team will be alright for 1 year and will keep doing what they do best. Then, I won't be surprised if we start to see some shift in management, reduction of staff and consolidation of contracting and account management team. It is inevitable. Unfortunately. Time will tell...

And oh, I have forgot the most important reason why I think Expedia has bought Venere.com: to re-gain market share against Booking.com and please Expedia Inc shareholders. Hotels is where you make some money (commission, mark up, better yield, ...) not Air anymore. Apparently Expedia Inc. shareholders agree with this move.

Last Minute Model Facing Extinction?

This is a guest post from HotelsCombined.com - one of Hotel Blogs sponsors - don't forget to visit their site.

Last Minute Model Facing Extinction? After the Acquisition of Travel.com.au, Wotif.com to go 365 Days.

- Research by HotelsCombined.com

It has become evident in recent times that there has been a shift away from the last minute model with sites such as Wotif.com to go 365 days. Moreover, according to a recent study by HotelsCombined.com these last minute distribution sites including Wotif.com, NeedItNow.com and LastMinute.com.au are no longer offering the best available rates.

Much hype was created in the hotel industry with the launch of Wotif.com in March 2000 when it offered a 14 day booking window. Before this time hotels relied on global distribution systems (GDS) to assist in selling their hotel rooms with dynamic pricing not yet coming into existence. Wotif.com gave hotels what they needed offering a simple system to effectively yield manage their distressed inventory. Wotif.com capitalized on this for several years then in October 2005 they extended to 28 day booking window. At present, according to an ASX announcement published on May 8, 2008 it is confirmed that a 365 day model is coming. It is interesting to note that Wotif.com is in reality one of the few remaining last minute websites entirely using the last minute model with NeedItNow.com and LastMinute.com.au previously making the move to a 365 day model.

Clearly we can see that there is a movement away from the last minute model, so the question needs to be asked if these sites are no longer distressed inventory sites, are they just another distribution channel? HotelsCombined.com has taken this question to see if there are any points of difference that these last minute sites have against other third party intermediaries.

After taking a sample of twenty-five hotels within five major Australian capital cities the results indicate that Wotif.com, NeedItNow.com and LastMinute.com.au are just another distribution channel with non last minute providers on HotelsCombined.com offering better available rates.

Q1 Results for 2 big OTAs

If you are interested to hear the latest financials results and development with 2 major OTAs, you can listen the calls here for Orbitz (2nd chart) and here for Priceline (1st chart).