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Hotel price fixing!

Hi everyone.

I actually work for a medium sized online hotel website (not expedia sized, not one man in his living room sized) and have just read Martin's guide to getting hotels and it made me think i should post on here.

Did you know that all the major hotel chains operate massive price fixing? We buy rooms from wholesale companys who get extremely good rates as they are buying in bulk, but if we sell it cheaper than the hotel does on their site, the hotel threatens us with legal action. The hotels like to claim that it 'confuses' customers and they don't like paying less! Yeah, right!

Any site that undercuts the major chains, will be threatened by legal action by them (which they probably can't win, but we can't test it!) and made to take off all that chains hotels. Have a look on expedia, and the chances are that they have the exact same prices for a hilton hotel as the hilton website. So much for competition!

Next time you do an article about hotels martin, send me an email and i can go in to this a lot more!

Comments

  • dmg24
    dmg24 Posts: 33,920 Forumite
    10,000 Posts
    Yep, this has already been proven with the recent Ramada/ Expedia loophole ...
    Gone ... or have I?
  • They (the hotel industry) call it "parity" pricing don't they ?

    It's only the big ones that do this I think, but yes the only one losing out is the customer. However in the long run the hotel companies will lose out as some hotels (probably smaller ones) will use more free market pricing and will win higher occupancy.
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