The pressure on hotels to display total room pricing information in the global distribution systems intensified last month, when Marriott International began disclosing tax and surcharge data in Worldspan.
Both Marriott and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide—which last year began providing total pricing data to Worldspan
(BTN, Jan. 20)—intend to display the information on other GDSs in the coming months, raising the bar for the industry.
Since corporate online booking tools pull rates from the GDSs, Marriott and Starwood total hotel pricing also is available to travelers booking on Worldspan's Trip Manager tool. Worldspan officials said they expect to start receiving similar data from other large hotel companies by year-end.
Total pricing is the latest volley in a larger move to improve the quality of hotel information overall on the GDSs. As the hotel content available through various third-party Internet channels has grown more robust, GDS content has seemed paltry by comparison. Consequently, the GDSs and online booking tools they support are eager to level the playing field, a development much appreciated by travel buyers: The more in-depth the hotel content, the more likely travelers are to have their questions answered, make the right booking decisions and comply with company policy.
The full pricing initiative on the GDSs actually mirrors the way car rental vendors have begun to display their total prices on Amadeus, Sabre and Worldspan
(BTN, June 23).Along with other benefits, access to full pricing information helps buyers with their budgeting and forecasting. Hotel taxes especially can add up when a given destination is a major city that is visited frequently by the company's travelers. For example, in New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, daily hotel occupancy taxes are 13.625 percent, 14.5 percent and 14.9 percent, respectively. In addition, travelers to New York pay a $2 per day hotel room surcharge on top of the tax.
"Enhanced data certainly are a step in the right direction," said Colleen Guhin, global travel manager at On Semiconductor. "The more detailed the pricing information that buyers can present to travelers, the more satisfied travelers will be booking this way."
Yet, it's only a first step. "The issue of the accuracy of the hotel information on the GDS still has to be addressed," said Miriam Moscovici, corporate travel manager at Deloitte Consulting, noting that neither the hotels nor the GDSs adequately police this content.
Still, in this time of tight budgets, Marriott's Bruce Wolff agreed that buyers benefit if they know in advance what travelers' total hotel bills will be, so they can manage their expenses better. "Aside from the room being X price, they now know they're actually paying an extra X for taxes and yet another X for surcharges," said Wolff, who is senior vice president for distribution sales and strategy. "Each entry is clearly noted, so there's no confusion," he added.
In most cases, in addition to a total figure there are separate lines for the room rate, tax and surcharge, confirmed Tom Wethington, Worldspan director of worldwide traveler solutions. "The tax line might be broken out a bit further for Chicago, for example. As a more heavily taxed market than, say, Kansas City, Chicago has that variety of taxes," he said.
Guhin welcomed complete pricing broken out line by line. "Most importantly, we still want to see the room rate because we need to know the basic cost for comparison purposes across hotels and across cities," she said. "It also means buyers are another step closer to getting full-folio hotel data on corporate charge cards, something many of us have been requesting for years," she said. "If the hotels then can get the rest of the charges broken out too and feed it to the corporate card vendors, we'll finally have realized this goal."
For the hotels, providing the data entailed some programming changes. "There were some new fields we had to start using to be able to communicate this to the GDS, but the larger benefit to our customers outweighed these considerations," said Linda Kent, Starwood director of global agency distribution.
Marriott was concerned that the GDS identify total-price rates accordingly. "We had to make sure there wasn't an unintentional bias against brands that provided the more complete information," Wolff said. "We didn't want to be in a situation where our price with tax would be compared unfavorably with another brand's price without tax in a rank order or strictly by price." Worldspan was able to display the rates in a way that reassured Marriott.
At Worldspan, the ability to provide enhanced hotel pricing is viewed as a milestone. "What it really represents is a change in how our system is used for hotels," Wethington said. "In the past, GDSs always performed hotel reservations. Now we're becoming a system that's more of a point-of-sale tool for travelers, as well as travel agencies, either online or offline."
Long term, Starwood and Marriott want to provide as much robust content on the GDSs as possible, including the hotel's location, accessibility, amenities, proximity to public transportation and other pertinent information. "Providing enhanced data is a way for us to differentiate ourselves in customers' minds. It gives travelers more of the information they need to make an intelligent booking decision," Kent said. For instance, "We had requests from our corporate clients to be able to include information on value-added amenities. If breakfast or local phone calls are part of a negotiated rate, we're now making that information known right at the place travelers are booking their reservations, including the corporate booking tool. We're telling them what they're entitled to upfront."
Wolff said, "With this new initiative, we've pretty much nailed down the pricing element, but there's a wide array of information—location and accessibility included—that the Internet provides quite well. We want to be sure the GDSs and the booking tools have it when travelers want it."
Still, Deloitte Consulting's Moscovici said the hotel content already in the GDSs contains too many inaccuracies. "Hotels control this content. Sometimes property names aren't even consistent with information elsewhere," she said. "The GDSs don't want to take accountability and do spot checks or audits. It's a huge frustration for many buyers." Yet, she is hopeful the new focus on adding more robust content will improve accuracy overall, saying, "Pricing is certainly a good place to start."