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> There are more 'shady' tricks that can lead to different prices for the same hotel, but it would be too long to write all of them in a post.

I'd love to see a blog post on this, and would gladly send beer/coffee money your way to see it!



I am currently working in an OTA and I am not in a position where I can openly share certain things, so I am sorry that blog post wont see the light soon.

But, I can share some pricing strategies that I've noticed that our competitors are doing, for example:

1) Different prices for different countries, example:

http://www.amoma.com/hotel.php?id=30800&key=2015022020150221... and open it again in english, using an incognito window (important): http://www.amoma.com/hotel.php?id=30800&key=2015022020150221...

2) Most of the hotels set the price using their local currency, and when the prices are converted to the customer currency, every OTA can decide to be optimistic or pessimistic. They could even decide to use a different conversion rate depending on the booking windows (number of days to checkin).

3) Price parity clause can be avoided if the price is not 'public' (http://www.osborneclarke.com/connected-insights/blog/hotels-...) so now most of the OTAs are trying hard to get the users logged in before booking. Once the user is logged in, the prices are not 'public', so the OTA can lower their commission slice of the price.

4) Some hotels have a specific (cheaper) rate for 'package bookings' i.e. the room is booked together with another service (flight, car rental...). But some OTAs decided that a flight booked earlier was enough to offer a 'package rate' to the customer. See: http://www.tnooz.com/article/expedia-playing-hardball-hotel-...

Thanks for the beer, we may have an opportunity to drink it together in the future.




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