We have a secret for you: there is a way to undercut OTA prices without affecting your rate parity

The majority of online travel agents include some form of a rate parity clause in their general terms and conditions, forcing hotels not to undercut the public room prices that the OTA charges for their hotel.

This restriction generally applies to all distribution channels, including other OTAs and the hotel’s own website.

And with the launch of Booking Basic, some hotels have learnt the hard way that disparity – even if the hotel has no fault in it at all – may result in booking.com selling your rooms at a lower price than your official rates.

But under such circumstances how on earth could you offer lower rates than OTAs? 

Well, there is a loophole in the system: and the keyword here is public rate.

Public rates are room prices available to everyone without any restrictions on the hotel’s own website or any other travel sites. So they are visible to the OTAs that are constantly scraping your booking engine as well as the booking engine of their competitors for these public rates.

But what if you offer your best rates only to a selected group of people and make it subject to registration? Even booking.com won’t be able to scrape rates that are only visible after registration.

And here is where Secret Rates come into play

…which are meant to exploit this loophole. 

A Secret Rate or a Secret Deal is a popup that appears when someone clicks on the  “Book now” button on your website, indicating that they are especially interested in your rates.

Visitors have the possibility to decide whether they are willing to provide their email address in exchange for a discount. 

Those who do register, get redirected to the booking engine with a coupon code or a promotion code embedded in the url, so they instantly can see the discounted rates. 

These pages where the promotion code is included in the url are not visible to anyone else, not even OTAs so it’s a 100% parity proof solution.

Why should you use a Secret Rate popup? 

We get this question a lot from hotels: “But why should I give a discount? Is it worth it?”

And the answer is Yes, it’s worth it for multiple reasons:

1. For a higher profit
It may sound contradictory at first, but offering a lower price to your guests means actually that you are saving more. How? Because of the better rate, guests will book directly on your website instead of the OTA and you don’t have to pay a 15-25% commission for those particular bookings.
Of course you will need to come up with a discount that is both favorable to your guests and still profitable for you. You don’t need to give 15-20% off, in fact you could offer an additional free service or simply a better booking condition than OTA’s for a start.

2. For a quality email list
Visitors registering for a secret deal make a very good quality database. They already know your property, and they are much more likely to book a stay at your hotel than visitors who have subscribed to take part in a prize competition for example.
You can retarget these registered visitors via email or online ads, multiplying the chance of them booking a room.

3. For more committed guests
We know for a fact that guests who book directly at the hotel are much more committed and much more loyal compared to guests who book through a middleman and have practically no direct connection with you. 

 Guest booking on your website are much more likely to book their next stay directly as well eliminating the middleman from their booking journey for good.

They are the ones who become returning guests or even loyalty guests over a longer period of time.

Here are a few examples of what you can achieve with this simple solution

1. Oxigen Hotel reached 22% subscription rate 

Oxigen Family Hotel is a family friendly spa hotel, who place great emphasis on strengthening their direct channel.

In their particular case the secret offer was promoted by Pafrany, the hotel’s very own mascot.

We can probably give him some credit for the succes 🙂 During the 5 months of the campaign almost every 4th visitor registered for the secret offer, 22% to be exact. And this is how they gained 1500 new subscribers.

In exchange for the email address Oxigen Hotel offered a 15 € discount, which guests could redeem immediately for their next stay.

During these 5 months the hotel earned 35,700 € in direct revenue, absolutely commission free. 

2. Anna Grand Hotel increased the conversion rate of registered visitors fourfold

The four-star Anna Grand Resort dedicated a special “Secret page” to their secret offer.  

Although the exact amount of the discount is not revealed on the langing page, they offer a promotion code that guarantees a lower rate than booking.com or any other OTA.

And their secret page tactic paid off. While the average conversion rate of their website is 2.85%, guests who registered for the secret page had a conversion rate of 11.37% meaning that registered visitors book 4 times more often on the website than visitors who don’t register.

And their average booking value is 10 EUR higher. 

Visitors registering for the secret offer generate on average 430,000 EUR commission free revenue yearly.

3. Danubius Hotels collected 25 thousand emails

Danubius Hotels, one of Hungary’s largest hotel chains, was amongst the first hotels to use a Secret Rate promotion.

After the first few successful hotel pilots they have introduced the secret rate promotion in all of their properties.

Since the start of the first pilot 3 years ago, they have collected 25,000 new subscribers, which is approximately the same amount of users they have lost when GDPR was introduced in 2018.

Thanks to the HotelHood solution, beside the huge email list they gained, the hotel chain managed to increase the number of direct bookings by 42%.

Read the entire Danubius Hotels success story here>

Want to achieve similar results?

As our examples above show, from larger chains to individual hotels, everyone should give secret deal popups a try because you’re guaranteed to get more valuable subscribers, higher profit, and more committed guests.

Book your free consultation today and start increasing your direct revenue in just a few days.

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