Hotelier Indonesia Magazine 30th Edition Edition 30th Finale 2017 | Page 57

Hotel Intel:
How do you plan to win this game? How can you offer
cheaper rates / better deals for customers than the other
OTAs?
Traveliko:
We didn’t start Traveliko to win the game. We have been
in the hotel industry for more than a decade and we have
seen first-hand how it has become stuck in a rut. We
simply wanted to create another option for ourselves, our
fellow hoteliers and for travellers.
Many refer to the relationship between the OTAs and the
hotels as an “ongoing war” but we believe Online Travel
Agents (OTAs) have been instrumental in taking the hos-
pitality industry to the next level and into the 21st century.
Traveliko is the next generation of that work and a natural
evolution for the hotel industry.
There have been many lessons learned over the last 20
years as hotels have developed a closer relationship with
OTAs. Responding to those lessons, as well as new de-
mands from a new generation of tech savvy travelers, is at
the core of Traveliko.
It is not about cheaper rates.
Everyone in the industry knows that rate parity practice
demands that all distribution partners get the same rate.
This is a very complex issue, but to summarize briefly: if
you see a room cheaper on one OTA, it’s either because the
hotel is running a special promotion for the OTA’s “mem-
bers”, or because there are some discrepancies in how the
price is being displayed – without taxes for example, or by
playing with exchange rate fluctuations.
There are also situations that arise where certain OTAs
decide to take less profit and undercut the market in order
to appear cheaper.
Those issues have been creating a lot of tension between
hotels and their distribution partners, it is becoming more
and more difficult for hotels to stay in control.
Traveliko charges lower commissions, but we also encou-
rage hotels to offer our customers added value via our
platform that directly benefit travellers but stay inline
with profit margins. In other words, Traveliko provides a
framework for hoteliers to create a better experience which
offers a feedback loop, in the form of analytics, back to the
hotels.
HOTELIER INDONESIA | 30th | Vol 14 | 2017 | www.hotelier-indonesia.com
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