One thing the aggregators do well is offer a consistent and more flexible search than the airlines' own sites which are often pretty terrible. For example, I live within 2 hours of about 5 airports, and when flying within Europe there are often two airports near the destination. Being able to search with multiple departure and arrival locations, with flexibility across several days, in order to find the cheapest combination of airports and dates is <i>still</i> a useful service.<p>I'm interested to know where Google Flights fits in to this picture. It is not well publicised but suddenly seems to have become quite good. A key feature for me is inclusion of the two big UK low-cost carriers, Ryanair and Easyjet. I'd assume Google are not working on commission but are just trying capture another area of search with their algorithms and data. Does anyone know more about it?
Hard to get through this article. It repeatedly insists that "everyone" uses aggregators, when airlines and hotels sell much of their product directly. In particular, Southwest does not sell through aggregators at all and they are the highest volume US airline. Personally I refuse to book through aggregators because I don't want finger-pointing between aggregator and airline if something goes wrong.<p>I stopped reading when the article said travel agents are irrelevant for anyone but boutique wealthy travelers. A large amount of corporate and government travel is routinely booked through agents, who receive a routine fee.<p>Hard to believe there is anything good in this article when so much of it in the opening paragraphs is facially inaccurate.
It's very true that in terms of hotel booking many consumers still see the big OTAs as the "bargain" sites and are often surprised to find that you can usually get an equal or better rate by booking directly with a hotel chain itself.<p>The company I work for, roomkey.com, was founded by six of the largest hotel chains to address this problem and bring more direct bookings back to the chains. The OTA duopoly of Expedia and Priceline have many of the hotel chains over a barrel with very aggressive contract terms that do not allow the hotel chain to advertise a lower direct rate than those they supply to the OTAs. And added to this, the OTAs take a pretty eye-watering commission.<p>However, most of the big chains are able to provide a lower rate to their own loyalty members. Room Key is unique in that we can access and aggregate these lower rates into a one-search solution. But, we are a tiny voice and competing with annual online marketing budgets of over a billion dollars each for the big two OTAs. Our job is a very hard one.<p>I'm glad articles like this are starting to paint a truer picture for the consumer. It really does make sense to book direct almost every time. It's easier to cancel/modify. You are the customer of the hotel, not a third party. You get loyalty benefits. And more of your money goes to those who take on the overhead of your stay and ensure the quality of your experience.<p>The OTAs used to be both cheap and convenient. Now they can only really lay claim to convenience through aggregation, and we at roomkey.com are trying to change that too.
I'm ehhhh on this.<p>I've worked with these systems. Airlines are pretty much never worth it through these sites. Margins are so damn razor thing that everyone pretty much scrambles for the last dollar. (Literally like 3-5 dollar margin"<p>Hotels are MORE worth it, in that they do offer deals through aggregators. Partially due to name and partially through exposure.<p>Booking.com is pretty good for this as they index alot of smaller hotels that generally are hard to find.
While I thought this was a pretty good article, the author is confusing what is an OTA vs a meta-search engine, even though he spends a paragraph explaining the difference. From one of the comments on the article:<p>* Expedia is not an aggregator/meta-search, it is an OTA itself. Meta-search engines are sites like skyscanner, hipmunk, trivago and kayak to mention some.<p>Another further confusion is when the author compares TripAdvisor with Hilton's own site. The screenshot even shows that TripAdvisor just redirects to Booking.com (Booking.com is owned by Priceline), who is the OTA.<p>The other thing the author doesn't discuss, but is an important part of the story, is that large OTAs spend billions advertising through Google, and are experts at it. Booking.com is <i>the</i> largest spender of <i>any</i> company on Google Adwords: <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2015/11/05/booking-com-largest-google-advertiser-facebook-hasnt-cracked-the-code-on-direct-response/" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/2015/11/05/booking-com-largest-googl...</a>
The lifecycle of aggregators may have some parallels with the fall of high-frequency trading. Eventually, the technology barrier to entry falls, incumbents fight back and the ecosystem rebalances.<p>Two topics missing from this article are AirBnB and low-cost airlines that fly to smaller airports. AirBnB does not compete with aggregators and cannot be shut out on the supply side by hotels. Do low-cost airlines (like Norwegian) benefit from customer discovery via aggregators?<p>Do aggregators change prices based on geographic location of the buyer? The article mentioned an experiment with higher prices for OSX buyers.
Who thinks that $2000 for a transatlantic trip is a good deal?<p>I just looked at Google flights and most offerings are under £400 return (GOA-JFK). Even in mid-august I struggled to find flights above £600. Either that guy is flying business (management consultant, maybe then) or he seriously got shafted on price.<p>Just had a look - premium economy is £900, business is almost £2000.<p>EDIT: Interesting, it gets a lot more expensive the other way around. Though Google does suggest Milan as an alternative route, which drops the price to £400 again. It seems like the hop from Genoa to the international hub makes the difference.<p>Or you could get a train from Milan, which is only 85 miles.
I had a somewhat similar experience as Mr. Giacobbe in the article.<p>Recently I had to make a last minute change in a hotel reservation via Agoda, but they require you to pay the full amount in order to cancel the reservation, and then re-do the booking.<p>So instead I called the hotel directly and got my reservation changed without any extra cost.
It's been this way for a long time. It's often cheaper to book directly from the airline than through an aggregator so it always pay to check (and use a tool like <a href="http://matrix.itasoftware.com" rel="nofollow">http://matrix.itasoftware.com</a> to also look for fare prices)<p>It makes sense, it's not in the airlines or hotels best interest to give lower prices to external OTAs and by providing better fares on their website they cut the middleman. It's also the reason why hotel chain tend to not reward user with status and points if they book through an aggregator.
I can tell you that the aggregators were totally useless when booking a hotel in New York.<p>"$99 for a room!" Great!. Erm, for tonight. Only. It's "$299 for every other night". Not so great.<p>Eventually it became clear that staying in Connecticut and taking the train in was a huge improvement.
I travelled to Spain in low season recently. For accommodation it doesn't hurt just to turn up, old school, without a booking.<p>Trivago have been blitzing our TV stations with ads, so I thought I'd give them a try. But their searches seemed just to redirect to booking.com so I couldn't see much value-adding.<p>Forget the 'only 2 left at this price' deception. I door knocked at a couple of places and they were half empty for the night - owners offered cheaper in cash than off a website! Now maybe this doesn't work in high season when everything is full but I found it liberating to stumble out randomly from a bus station to the tourist information centre who would plot for me on a map the best places to stay!
The author missed a major driver of this - which is that the hotels etc are not allowed to undercut the OTAs, or the OTA will boot them off.<p>This is why you can call and get a better deal, and why many hotels are aggressively trying to build loyalty programs
Recently left a startup in that business. The article is spot on.<p>And there may be technological opportunities here, like open APIs to hotel property management systems or even property management systems as a service....
One thing not mentioned yet is that "resort fees" are basically just a way to avoid paying commission to the aggregators. The combination of the ~20% commission and the most favored nation status that aggregators require from hotels without the negotiating power of Hilton limits the options hotels have to raise rates. And as the article mentions, this leads to hotels trying harder these days to establish a relationship with customers as an end run around the MFN clauses.<p>Also, I've probably booked 100+ hotels in the past few years, and I still do the majority of them through booking.com. I am aware that I can sometimes get cheaper rates by booking direct, and I do sometimes, if the delta is high enough. (On the other hand, I actually just booked a Hilton that was cheaper on the aggregator than on their own website.) I'm also aware that every hotel employee will tell you that 3rd party customers get the worst rooms in the place and are the first ones to get walked when overbooked. I can't say I've ever noticed any problems there. I'm even aware that booking's rating system is skewed - their 10 point scale actually only runs from 2.5 to 10, and the median rating is something like 8.1, so keep that in mind when you book your "Very Good, 8.1" hotel.<p>Despite all that, it has one killer feature that making direct reservations doesn't have - a uniform interface for making/changing/canceling bookings. It's a tremendous benefit in countries where I don't speak the language. I can do it fairly reliably on either the app or the website even when my network connection is dodgy, at any time, and without having to speak the language. I do admit that my requirements are fairly specific and most people traveling within their own country with reliable phone/internet service are generally better off doing the search first on an aggregator, and then booking direct (after signing up for loyalty programs) if the price is close.<p>(I work in the industry, but not for any of the companies mentioned.)
Use Lola.<p><a href="https://www.lolatravel.com/about" rel="nofollow">https://www.lolatravel.com/about</a><p><i>"We’re a new kind of travel company that provides on-demand, personal travel service through a smartphone app. The Lola app instantly connects people to our team of travel agents who find and book flights, hotels, and cars for our customers. We also provide support while they’re on their trips."</i><p>Aggregators are all fun and games till your plans change. And Lola gives you human curated travel (they really do consider your tastes) at aggregator costs.
I've been running citybreakflights.com since Jan this year and one thing I've noticed is that buying tickets directly from the airline tends to be much cheaper than using an OTA. I track prices of flights from the UK to Europe for people wanting to go away for a few days. I don't track hotels but when I go away on a city break I use booking.com. Might start going directly and comparing the difference in price.
Skyscanner is great, but I get the sense that the airlines have cut them off. They used to show almost every carrier, and sent you straight to the airline website to book (I assume they got paid for referrals). Now they seem to search other aggregators, who have spotty data themselves. The great whole month price overview never works any more.
I find the aggregators still offer better deals if you're willing to forego stuff like being able to cancel or selecting the exact hotel you want to stay in.
It makes sense. Companies will use price discrimination to offer higher prices when they are able to segment the market. This would happen regardless of whether the lazy people were on aggregators or going direct. If they're able to separate the groups and one is more price sensitive than the other, that group would tend to be charged higher prices.