Cross-Channel Hotel Shopping

Over the past month I have traveled to California, New York and Chicago both for work and pleasure.  Being a lover of hotels and a hotel owner, I am obsessed with the industry.  I could literally spend days browsing through different hotel sites and brokerage sites looking for the perfect place to stay.  I am always in search of the coolest place available at the best price.  After reading through this week's material on channel conflict, I began to think about my recent booking techniques and the types of channel conflict the different sites were facing.  The world we live in is continuously evolving and new brokerage sites are popping up every day.  Interesting enough, I used a different form of booking for each trip throughout the past month.  This supports Roy Wollen's presentation that "customers don't care which channel gets credit."

I thought it would be interesting to track my cross-channel shopping habits over the past month.  Though all of the sites I used to book my hotel stays have partnerships with the actual hotels, they are still all competing with one another.  The hotels themselves must make their property available on each site, or face the risk of missing out on the opportunity to capture a new customer. My recent trip to California was a family trip booked via telephone by my father.  Though times have changed, it is funny for me to see how a lot of the older generation gets stuck in their old ways.  As I was looking to book our trip to New York, I used hotels.com, tablethotels.com, jetsetter.com and the actual hotel sites to try and find the best deal.  I ended up using tablethotels.com to book because I found the best price.  It was interesting to see how prices literally fluctuated hourly on each of these sites.  For my Chicago trip, I also browsed the above sites, but ended up using hotels.com for my stay.

Each of the sites I used to find a hotel used different techniques ranging from last-minute deals,  private membership promotions and top weekly deals.   No matter how enticing the promotions, I still felt no loyalty to any of the sites I used to book my stays.  As long as I know the product I am getting, it doesn't matter the method I use to book as long as I can find the best deal for the place I want to stay.   

In addition to the sites I used to find a hotel above, there are other booking sites that perform similar functions: Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotwire, Kayak and many, many more. As we learned this week, "Customers don't make a distinction between channels, they see your brand across channels." Since this is the case, hotels need to make the effort to develop partnerships with as many reliable booking sites as they can.  On the other end, booking sites face another battle.  It is up to them to develop the tools to attract and keep as many customers as possible. Though there are enticing reasons to book with sites, I have yet to find a site that has locked me in as their customer.