Is this channel to market completely sewn up by big players?

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
Stewart
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Is this channel to market completely sewn up by big players?

Post by Stewart »

We only use ABnB to fill gaps left from our primary source of bookings - our own website. Having experienced a markedly declining booking rate with TA and HomeAway(that latter being never anything but crap) we dropped them both five years ago or so.

I do still get hopefuls from magazines and smaller OTA's trying to generate listing business. So my question is. Does anybody get significant business from small players? Let's be precise. If anyone is getting a total of 15% PA or more from a small OTA (or cumulatively from a group of them please do tell.

In a separate question who has experience of the upmarket outfits like Sawdays and how much PA% turnover do they generate for you?
zebedee
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Post by zebedee »

Are you prepared to pay an annual subscription to be on a listing site? No commission - so it will feel like you are taking a risk.
If so, have you looked at Independent Cottages?
Stewart
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Intrigued

Post by Stewart »

Zebs. Are you on to something? Please explain
zebedee
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Post by zebedee »

There are sites where you pay to have your advert shown, and don’t pay any commission. Tons and tons of sites, most of which just take your money and you never get a booking or hear from them until your subscription needs renewing.

Independent cottages will set up your advert on their site so you pay extra the first year, but then you can edit a lot and put on late availability. Take a look at local to you properties on the site and see what you think.

I always start off by looking at any site as a prospective holiday maker and if the search filters don’t work for me I walk away at that point. I don’t advertise on any commission sites at all. I get bookings from my own website, local tourist sites and Independent cottages gives me enough bookings to make the fee worthwhile although I do get enquires that don’t convert from them in a way that I don’t from any other source.
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Mouse
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Post by Mouse »

I'm in Ibiza so not sure if this company is relevant to your area but I have been with Tots to Travel for 4 years now and they give me far more business than TA and HA.....which is easy as I get no bookings from them at all now!
I'm not with air bnb or booking.cm so they're my main supplier of bookings plus the direct ones that I get.

As the name suggests they major on families and do have a list of facilities you have to supply but I've found them a professional company to deal with. They charge commission and you get paid shortly after the client pays....so well before they arrive. You can also communicate direct with the client immediately.

Mousie
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Stewart
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Paid Sites

Post by Stewart »

Independent Cottages. I'm not being intrusive but in meaningful terms how good are they?

1) What percentage of your yearly business do they generate for you?

2) What is the percentage of their costs to your sales?

2) How much of that business would you have got anyway through other routes (I'm thinking summer time when we can sell our place multiple times)
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Post by Martha »

We get tons of families with small children, I wonder if we should try Tots to Travel. I always thought we would not be suitable due to the open staircase upstairs, up to the mezzanine (a magnet for small kids!) but we've worked out a stargate solution for that now. We provide almost all of the equipment and could easily get the few other small bits and pieces. I might give them a call, thank you.
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Stewart
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Post by Stewart »

I thought this was straight forward and meaningful question to members - Do independents generate meaningful business for you? - . Surprised and saddened at the lack of feedback from the community.
SusanMay
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Post by SusanMay »

I have got a lot a lot of my bookings over the years (much more than 15%) from a little independent website set up by someone - more a labour of love I think - to provide info on my holiday cottages's seaside area. Not exactly at OTA but alongside webpages on things to do, history, diary of events etc he has some accommodation pages. The subscription to advertise on this website,with a picture and a small description and a link to our own website, has made it very worthwhile.

Last year the website owner decided that 2019 would be the final year he takes adverts as fewer and fewer holiday home owners and other businesses (including restaurants, B & Bs, hotels) were choosing to advertise on his site, instead using airbnb, tripadvisor etc. So perhaps the question is just as pertinent the other way around. Are we - holiday home owners - still generating meaningful business for the independents?
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roxytoo
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Post by roxytoo »

Stewart I think your headline sums it up and theres not a lot else left to say.............it is sewn up and a lot of people are getting out................
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Post by Joanna »

In our experience small independent sites don't generate much business for us. It seems that some people find us on the big OTAs and then google us so we get their bookings via our own site. We also get loads of click throughs from Facebook groups - I don't know if you'd count them as independents.
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Joint owner of Baker's Cottage in Chester & Chandler's Cottage in Sidmouth
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apexblue
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Post by apexblue »

Ind Cottages never worked for us only in peak periods.

ABB generates our most bookings this year but we offer 2 nights and flexi start days.
It is better to remain quiet and have one think you are stupid, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt....

The biggest mistake we make in life is thinking we have time.
Frenchlady
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Post by Frenchlady »

We carried out our own survey on our guests this year who booked via the 2 big boys Abnb & B.com .... the result was really what we expected ... nobody seemed to mind paying more when we explained about the commission being charged. It seemed that a lot were just quite lazy and too much effort to search for us direct ... just a lot easier to book with credit card without having the personal touch of e-mailing the owner and waiting a reply. Can understand to a degree but I would rather have the extra money in my pocket to buy a nice meal!!!!! The smaller French sites are still bringing in some bookings but not as many they used to. Fighting a losing battle I fear.
Stewart
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Maybe a final observation

Post by Stewart »

Looking again at the past few years ABB is worth between 10 and 15% (we do not use any other OTA's). In that time I have found that in our area anyway,

1) price trumps everything else (including off street parking, wet rooms, large telly, fast broadband, Netflix, expensive riser/recliner etc)
2) Most bookings come through smart phones and it is clear from subsequent customer enquiries that they tend not to read the listing very carefully before booking
3) The physical interaction is much cooler
4) Customers tend to delay their departure as much as they can
5) They tend to create and leave more mess

I'm OK with this because this is a business to me and I have the option to stop. But it seems that the separation between customer and provider, filled by the OTA drives a colder experience on both sides. these customers do not attach the same level of value to the facilities and behave accordingly.

On the price front we have successfully adopted a fairly high cleaning charge and a per person charge. This allows a low headline price. I'm convinced that the headline price seals the deal and by the time the customer realises that there are other charges, laziness rather than anything else makes them complete. There is no underhand trickery here as it is clear in the booking process workflow.

To me we have a paradox of people looking for "bottom dollar" over everything else but who are not actually that price sensitive if they are about to commit.

I'm sure some suppliers will not agree to the ethos of this charging model but I think if the game changes you need to adapt or go the way of Charles Cawley who singularly got it wrong about the imminent demise of the "big legacy players".
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Re: Maybe a final observation

Post by newtimber »

Stewart wrote: On the price front we have successfully adopted a fairly high cleaning charge and a per person charge. This allows a low headline price. .
I thought guests entered the dates/people staying and the price was shown inclusive of all the cleaning costs?
On my test today, that's certainly what happened.
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