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The Drastic Fall of Business Volumes in Hotel Booking Services

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Hotel reservation agencies provide very good mediation between guests and the Hotels.
It is sometimes very easy to deal with the booking agency for your hotel needs than dealing with the hotels direct.
In most cases, there are always some delays in communication.
Booking be amendments and cancellations are dealt with quicker through the agencies.
As an agency represents many hotels and not just one, it gives the honest opinions about hotels to guests.
In 1995, hotel booking business was very lucrative.
Booking Agencies which had presence on the internet were able to get lower hotel rates for their clients because their bargaining power was stronger.
Through the agencies web sites, hotels were able to reach clients all over the world where there was internet connection.
We are based in London but we were taking bookings from guests from every corner of the Globe.
Competition in the industry was not very strong then.
Many booking agencies made a lot of money between 1995 and 2002.
By 2003, more than 70% of the hotels had their own web sites and started competing with the Agencies for bookings on the internet.
Hotels also started to withdraw discounts they were offering to guests who were booking through agencies' web sites.
They also started to cut down on room allocations to agencies because they realised that they could sell rooms without assistance from the agencies.
Commission rates to the agencies also started to drop and agencies were forced to take any rate which the hotels offered.
Room rates of agencies started to be dearer compared to what the hotels were offering at their web sites.
The constant changes in Google search ranking algorithms have also negatively affected many Travel web sites.
Web sites which were formerly on the first and second pages in hotels search results were no longer.
The changes from Google gave birth to the Search Engine Optimization services which give no guarantees but can be very expensive.
Also, internet users started to book their rooms direct from the web sites of the hotels instead of booking through the agencies' sites.
There is the general consensus that, you get better deals from the hotels direct.
From 2006, the internet hotel booking agency business was almost dead.
Apart from almost every hotel having a web site now, the birth of Google local business listing has not helped the booking agencies.
Hotels with even poorly optimised web site will still show up when the internet user searches by the name of the hotel, so long as it the property has submitted its details to Google via the local business listing page.
As guests now prefer to make their booking direct with the hotels, they first click on the hotels' listings in the Google local listing section on the page.
When one even searches for a hotel by postcode, many hotels are displayed from the Google local businesses database and there is always the possibility that the user will make a booking at one of hotels in the local business listing section and will not even border to look at the results which are below them.
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