The rise and rise of online booking accommodation providers such as wotif.com are not to blame for professional conference organisers losing commissions on booking hotel rooms.
Certainly corporate travellers utilise online sites to make last minute bookings but the number of bookings (or commissions) being lost by professional conference organisers are not substantially due to web-based booking engines.
CEO of wotif.com, Robbie Cooke, told mice.net that because wotif.com operates in the four-week last minute space he did not believe they were impacting professional conference organisers.
He said other web-based hotel booking sites that offered cheap accommodation 365 days a year may be having more of an effect on conference planners.
“A lot of people going to conferences traditionally book their accommodation six months out from the conference around the time the conference program comes out, and often to ensure they stay in the host hotel or venue,” he said.
“There is a subset of people [delegates] who are perhaps a bit more cost-conscious. They tend to book for attendance at the conference and then wait until the last few weeks to book their accommodation, hopeful of a cheaper rate than what the organiser has offered. That’s just the nature of the market.”
Mr Cooke said wotif.com was “very keen to keep working with the industry”, and cited as an example of this the arrangement wotif.com has with eventconnect.com.
Through this relationship, meeting and event planners using the eventconnect.com website to search for and book conference venues have an option of putting a wotif.com button on their conference web page for their conference delegates to use to book their own accommodation direct.
Managing director of ICMS Australasia, Bryan Holliday, said online travel sites are a terrific asset to the individual traveller but his company has found that their conference clients prefer to book their travel and accommodation via their dedicated delegate services division.
“It’s really all about service. I’ve seen no significant change in the past 10 years in the percentage of delegates who book their travel and accommodation through us,” he said.
“They take comfort from the fact that they’re dealing directly with the conference organiser rather than booking through intermediaries. Of course things may change in the future - they often do - but so far there has been no negative impact on our business. Most of us work hard and are time poor. We can either wash our own car or visit a car wash. It’s all about choice and real and perceived value for money.”
Chairman of Event Planners Australia, Ray Shaw, said in the “good old days” his company used to book as much as 60 to 70 per cent of all delegate accommodation but over the last decade that figure has dropped to about 30 to 35 per cent.
“And frankly we see that number being eroded even more in the next few years,” he said.
“There are a few reasons: online booking being one of them but by no means the most important. The greatest impact comes from hotels that have grown fat and lazy with the high occupancy levels. Many have forgotten that conference business was their saviour in the lean past years and adopted onerous and unconscionable `group’ block booking policies including longer cut off dates for block release, full payment up front, penalties for release, etcetera.
“These group policies do not meet the needs of convention delegates. When will some hotels figure out that delegates are fully independent travellers who book and pay for their own accommodation?”
He said another cause for the reduction in conference bookings via his business was that hotels see conference rates as premium rates “and quote ludicrous rates that are above standard corporate or tour package rates”.
“If the conference rate is not one of the lowest available at the time then savvy delegates will get a better rate from online or travel packages.
“The next impact is the trend for delegates to book later – perhaps the world is so busy that they leave registration and accommodation, even air tickets to the last few weeks. Whereas we used to expect 50 per cent to have booked by early bird cut off dates, say 90 days prior to the event, this has dropped to about 25 per cent. Of course the hotels want us to release all unused rooms at 90 days or more so 75 per cent of delegates then are forced to find their own accommodation because the onerous penalties make it too bloody risky for us to hold blocks any more.”
In relation to online bookings, Mr Shaw said booking accommodation online is, on the whole, easy, convenient and offers a considerable choice of accommodation styles and prices.”
“But it does have one major drawback – the headquarters hotel loses out to cheaper or more available hotels.”
Tour Hosts accommodation department manager, Monique Vannus, said Tour Hosts has been watching with interest the impact online hotel booking systems is having, and they have not found any real effect.
“Online travel sites only affect association business when PCOs have not managed their room blocks effectively and have had to wash back a large number of rooms to the hotels,” she said.
“This is when delegates will be able to get good last minute deals. One of Tour Hosts’ accommodation KPIs is materialisation, which assists in decreasing the negative impacts to rates from online booking sites. To ensure that the contracted business remains competitive against last minute sites, PCOs need to ensure that they contract rate parity to protect the contracted rooms, and that they educate the client and the delegate of the differences in the room rates, particularly relating to terms and conditions.
“The understanding needs to be mostly about an ‘apples to apples’ rate, by way of if you book with a one night’s deposit and one night’s cancellation fee then you cannot compete with saver rates whereby there is no cancellations or changes and 100 per cent charges. Tour Hosts as part of its negotiations to remain competitive ensures that rate parity is discussed at the time of contracting to ensure that delegates and clients are protected from rates which are outside of the market conditions.”
Ms Vannus says many corporate bookings are currently taking up large volumes of rooms which squeezes out inventory for conference accommodation block booked and increases rates, especially in the tighter markets, including Brisbane and Perth.
“Many of our association clients need to be educated in the marketplace of the conference destination to understand how we should promote the destination’s accommodation to delegates to ensure that they book early to avoid not getting the accommodation of their choice, or having to pay last minute prices to find a room.”
Wotif.com’s Robbie Cooke said corporate travel was a much stronger candidate for using wotif.com because there were no long leads times as is often the case with the conference market.
“Corporate travellers are quite comfortable leaving their bookings until the last few weeks before they travel and as such we are seeing strong interest [in wotif.com].”
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