The U.S. hotel industry struggles with a harsh fact: each night, on average, 40 percent of its rooms go empty. This, coupled with the tremendous funds hotels spend for marketing, has driven an innovation explosion in recent years. A variety of online sales models now aim squarely at helping hotels to fill more rooms. Hotels operate in a fragmented field with nowhere near the pricing leverage of U.S. airlines, which have now combined into essentially five players. So one finds countless places on the Internet to simply shop rates and book a hotel room. A couple of newcomers are trying to change things.
Getaroom.com, a year-old Miami firm, shows you the lowest published rate for a particular room and then promises to beat it when you phone them. Say you’ve looked around and found that the best rate for the Hilton Phoenix airport appears to be $195 per night. Call Getaroom and you’re alleged to get a rate from their call center that is below that hotel’s lowest published rate. The catch? You won’t know exactly what you’re paying until the company bills your credit card. But you will know the point at which you won’t pay higher, or $195 for that airport Hilton. (The company takes a $25 fee if you cancel.) Getaroom’s rates average about 25 percent below the lowest published rate, says Bob Diener, Getaroom’s co-founder and a former president of Hotels.com, now part of Expedia.
Read the full story:http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/travelers_check/archives/2011/02/new_efforts_to_sell_empty_hotels.html
