Hotels are failing to honour price guarantees, which are advertised on their websites, reports travel and hospitality industry digest, e-tid.

Published: 19 Apr 2005

Hotels are failing to honour price guarantees, which are advertised on their websites, reports travel and hospitality industry digest, e-tid.

KPMG’s sixth annual Global Hotel Distribution Survey, which was conducted across 330 hotels in 16 countries, evidently found that although 43% of hotels offered best web rate price guarantees only 27% of them delivered their price promise. e-tid states that UK hotels performed worse with as few as 19% honouring price guarantees on their website prices.

“These survey findings are surprising considering the amount of effort being made by hoteliers to direct customers to their own booking channels,” says Nick Pattie, Director of KPMG’s Hotel Practice. “Hotels want their customers to book direct but in practice, hoteliers aren’t delivering consistent prices and customers will continue to use other booking methods which offer more attractive room rates.”

Further KPMG findings are that:

- only 1% of hotels are priced consistently across all channels, although the variation between the lowest and average price has dropped to 30% this year from 50% last year;

- in 36% of cases, the cheapest way to book a room is through an online agent such as Expedia or lastminute.com;

- hotels’ own web sites are cheapest in 19% of cases, compared with 16% in 2004; and

- indirect channels were cheaper 58% of the time than hotel direct channels, a marginal improvement on a year ago.

However, e-tid does point out that hotels are now starting to show signs of taking more control over their distribution strategies. This is because due to improved market demand, they no longer have a dearth of rooms to shift at discount prices via online agents.