New hotel rate parity and distribution issues for 2023

Maintaining price parity across all channels becomes harder to enforce, potentially leading to conflicts with other distribution partners

As businesses contend with maintaining the fine balance between incentivizing direct bookings and ensuring their room rates are consistent across their distribution channels, the distribution landscape has become a lot less transparent.

Key takeaways

• ‘Bait-and-switch' is intended behavior designed to lure in a potential customer with an attractive, yet misleading, money-saving opportunity;
• It is a valid parity issue since the bait-and-switch rates that are presented to potential guests drive business away from the brand, due to the fact that different prices are shown on different channels;
• Seeing the cheaper rate piques the guest's interest and they may click through to investigate further, just to discover that the rate has increased and is now equal to, or even higher than the rate on the hotel's own website.

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