Staff Reporter
The holiday season is just around the corner in Spain, but how do you really book a hotel room cheaper ? All those booking sites are all the same, right? And yet the largest booking websites make billions of euros in profit. How does this work? We explain it to you.
The usual suspects
Those who want to book a hotel often go to the well-known booking sites. You often have a choice from a wide range, and booking a hotel room can be done in no time. Because the larger players invest a lot of money in advertising campaigns, they always come into the picture and they also claim that they have competitive prices.
Where do the millions of euros that the major booking sites spend on marketing come from? How do they manage to turn profits of billions of euros with these marketing budgets and at the same time make us believe that we are the cheapest?
To answer these questions, we need to know how the price is built up when we use a booking platform.
How do they make money?
We start at the beginning. First, a hotelier joins the platform. Because the major players have now managed to conquer such a large market share, it is actually necessary for every hotelier to be one those sites. If not, the hotel will be difficult or even impossible to find and no hotel rooms will be rented out. This directly ensures that the hotelier is dependent on the booking site in question.
Now more about the price. Suppose a hotelier wants to get 100 euros for a room, then that is of course not the price we pay. There is a considerable amount of commission added on top. And because these platforms are so large, they also have insight into how many hotel rooms are still available in a certain city or region. They know whether there is scarcity or not.
Because they have this knowledge, it can happen that in the event of scarcity, even more than the usual twenty to 25 percent commission is charged on top of the room rate that the hotelier wants to receive. This can sometimes be as much as fifty or sixty percent!
Now you probably also understand better where the unlimited marketing budgets and billions of euros in profit come from. No wonder the shareholders remain satisfied.
Would you like to book your hotel room cheaper?
Fortunately, there are plenty of options for this today. An example of a cheap provider is Locktrip.com. This booking site offers hotel rooms without charging high commissions. This means that you are immediately 20% to 25% cheaper. Sometimes it can happen that the price of a hotel is the same with other providers, but it is rare.
Locktrip.com
Locktrip is a company that was founded in 2017, but its awareness is relatively limited at the moment. This is because there has been a lot of hard work behind the scenes on the project before it was presented to the general public. That moment is now here.
So it is not surprising that you have never heard of Locktrip, since the marketing has not started. However, collaborations have already been made, including with Webjet.com.au. This is a stock exchange listed Australian booking site that is enthusiastic about Locktrip’s innovative way of keeping hotel prices low. They have now taken an interest in the company and will also use these lower prices on their platform.
Another fun fact is that Locktrip will never spend millions on marketing, because all these costs ultimately have to be paid by the customer. And this is exactly what they don’t want.
A new revenue model
We hear you thinking, “How does this new booking site keep their prices low while charging no commission”? This is possible by using blockchain technology. Without going deeper into this, rather technical, story, this makes it possible to eliminate intermediaries and create a different revenue model. Customers do not notice this and can, as is usual with other websites, simply pay with their credit card.
The expectations for Locktrip are high and growth of this company is inevitable. After all, who wouldn’t want to save a lot of money on exactly the same hotel room that you see on a major booking site?
Find out for yourself at www.locktrip.com and sign up. You will now also receive an extra 5% discount with your first booking by using the discount code CTTIP . This makes the cheapest hotels even cheaper.
