Hello everyone:
My name is Shawn Pigg and I am proud to be the CEO of Hotels Etc. for the past 10 years.
Something very important is happening in the hotel industry right now and you may not be aware of it. The travel industry and, more specifically, the hotel industry is going to prevent hotel price competition…and they don’t want you to know about it. So, I have some bad news for you, then some fantastic news if you book hotels for pleasure or business.
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First, a bit of history.Ten years ago or more, travel booking engines were popping up everywhere. Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity etc. made it easy to search properties and book your own hotels because many hotels didn’t want the expense of building their own booking technology.Those big booking engines served a great purpose then.
Fast forward 5 years and companies like Kayak came along, allowing you to search across all the booking engines for the lowest rate.Yup…a travel search engine to search the travel search engines.Theirs is a simple business model.No matter which search engine you ultimately book through via Kayak search, Kayak makes commission as does the middle-man search engine Expedia, Travelocity etc…That’s a really smart business model from them.Naturally, the middle-man engines like Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz started to drop their price to the lowest so systems such as Kayak would list them first.From that, a price war was created.
Hotels started to get upset because nobody would go to their sites (which all of them have now) to make a booking because they didn’t show the cheapest rates. Worse yet, the hotels were getting hammered paying commissions to multiple search engines for the bookings sent to them.Hotels started to fight back by dropping their listed price to below what the public booking engines (Kayak, Travelocity, Expedia etc.) listed, hoping you would make your booking via their hotel site instead of going through the public booking engines, thereby not having to pay commissions.
The battle of the big hotel brands VS. the public search engines has continued and created turmoil.They don’t like each other much, and have essentially stopped communicating.Without getting into all the legal-ese, what has emerged is an agreement that all the big public booking engines will have to sell the hotel’s rooms at an agreed-upon minimum selling rate.IE. No more competition and really bad news for the consumer that has relied on those booking engines!If you are questioning this, simply click on Kayak and you will start to see how uniform hotel prices are becoming on their site.
Great News for Hotels Etc. Members!
Simply put, Hotels Etc. does not work on this type of platform.Our business model is completely different.We are a closed-loop program with contracts with the top buyers of hotel inventory and net-rate providers. Bottom line is that we have buying power across all the major hotel brands and countless boutique & stand-alone hotels around the world that those other search engines don’t have.Our system delivers you the biggest discounted hotel rates possible.We will beat the available public rates 90+% of the time.In many cases, the savings are incredible.There are a lot of other so-called travel clubs, membership or discount clubs, but I can promise you that NOBODY has built a more consistently cost-reducing program than Hotels Etc.
If you stay in hotels even just once or twice per year, Hotels Etc. will save you significant money at many of the best hotels in the world.Click here to join today! www.hotelsetc.com.
Watch this video to see that is already is having.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qljp13ObOic
Travel Well…Spend Less.
Shawn Pigg, CEO
Hotels Etc