Major hotel companies have been unable to break the habits of consumers from visiting OTAs in favor of looking and booking at the brand’s proprietary sites.

The end result is millions upon millions of dollars being funneled away from individual hotels and into the pockets of the smarter, faster and better marketed OTAs.

Now that hotel rates have tanked during the last year, the hotel companies are once again awakening and realizing that these sites, while they serve a purpose, are effectively torpedoing their profit potential while lining the pockets of companies such as the aforementioned Expedia and others, such as Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline.com.

“This is an interesting dilemma the hotel brands are facing. It’s really tough for hoteliers when RevPAR is down 20 percent,” said Bill Carroll, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Cornell School of Hotel Administration, who referred to the Choice-Expedia conflict as “acrimonious.”

But the larger looming issue is consumers have been well trained to visit these sites, which puts the one hotel company that does not participate in a major OTA at a significant disadvantage against its competitive set.

Get the full story at hotelinteractive.com