The coronavirus pandemic has made many hotel companies more eager for bookings without online travel agency commissions and with data on who the customers are. Price-comparison websites are a significant source of such bookings, and new tools are making it easier for smaller hoteliers to ramp up their ad purchases on these metasearch brands.
Until now, independent hotels and regional hotel groups haven't spent on metasearch. Yet some technological and cost barriers are falling away for smaller players. Plus, the sector's revenue crisis has driven some desperate hoteliers to try new things.
"Many small hotels are operating at low capacity," said Richard Clarke, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research who covers European leisure and hotels. "If I'm a hotel manager, I know I'm not going to be refurbishing the property. So I can use my extra time to see how to use metasearch to cut my biggest cost line after labor, which is distribution — which is about 30 percent hotel profitability."
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