The process of booking and making reservations in hotels has dramatically changed throughout the years. With just a swipe of a finger and a touch on the reserve button, travelers can easily book, reserve and cancel hotel accommodations on their mobile devices. However, reports claim that booking and cancelling hotel reservations have become costly, and hotel promotional marketing strategies have become deceiving in the past months.
Jeffrey Buszkiewicz, fiscal office for the Indiana University School of Education, shared his experience in booking a hotel for his family online. He initially saw a 72-hour online sale after Thanksgiving at the Hilton Hotels & Resort website with a room at $129 at the Hilton Garden Inn in Manhattan for Christmas night. To his surprise, after discussing the deal with his wife, the rate has already increased by $40 a night the next day when he was about to make the booking, a report from NY Times revealed.
Some hotel experts claim that these changes in the hotel industry and market is brought by the stiff competition of rental sites like Airbnb and HomeAway, who are getting a considerable amount of clients' share in the accommodation industry. Due to these, hotels are adapting new and higher fees as well as other restrictions that may help in generating more revenues for their business.
Just this November, Hilton has already embarked in a program that imposes a $50 cancellation penalty for clients any time after a reservation is booked, Seattle Times reports. Although Hilton Honors loyalty members are exempted from the new program, it is still not helping the hotel industry at all.
However, travelers are still more used to the non-refundable fees that Airbnb charges them, around 6-12 percent of the total amount of booking, which is clearly emphasized as the amount used by the website to run the company.
With the stiff competition in the hospitality and accommodation industry, hotels' techniques in generating more income for their business is definitely bringing in more complications and problems rather than benefits to their business.