Rates: Rental listings websites vs own website booking

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
Jenny7
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Joined: Sat Jul 01, 2017 8:26 pm
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Rates: Rental listings websites vs own website booking

Post by Jenny7 »

Hi

We are fairly new to the holiday let/vacation rental market, only start in mid May this year 2017.

At the moment, we are with few OTAs like Booking.com, Tripadvisor, HomeAway etc and in the midst of setting an account with Expedia.

As OTAs have different commission rates, Booking 15% Expedia 18% etc, but each of them are wanting owners to provide them the "Best Available Rates", eg. a base rate GBP100 will appear as £115 on booking.com and GBP115 (instead of GBP118) as well on expedia (we have to think of ways to get the 3% back from Expedia, was wondering if you have any suggestions).

This is even trickier when our website is going to charge less for guests, only around 3% fee credit card fee, so our website will be showing e.g. £103

May you let us know how you and other holiday letting oweners overcome such issues with these money sucking OTAs??

So in summary how do we:

1.) Pit OTAs against OTAs without getting into trouble with them on Best Available Rates
2.) Pit our own website against OTAs.

Thank you for taking the time to read and any advice greatly appreciated.

Our website is ready and going live soon though it's going to take time to pipe through google list but we want to make sure we ain't treading on a time-bomb minefield with the OTAs.