Hotel Web Design

About US:

DiscountHotelUSA.com is a wholes own subsidiary of Nola Webmasters LLC. We provide a wide range of web services and our largest customer base is the Hotel and Travel Industry. This document is an overview of building websites for the Hotel Industry. If you would like more information or have any question please don’t hesitate to contact us by your preferred contact method or visit our main business site at www.NolaWebMasters.com.

Overview of Online Hotel Booking Process:

Most hotels that offer online bookings are affiliates of multiple technology companies, commonly referred to as distribution channels (DC), that run proprietary e-commerce software to handle these transactions. There are two major types of DC’s; third-party merchant models and commission based models. We have left a simple explanation of these two models below.  
 

Third-party merchant models: 

The two largest DC’s in terms of rooms consumed are Expedia.com and Hotels.com, who both primarily operate on the merchant model. What they do is buy blocks of rooms from you at a discounted rate, typically 70%, and then sell the rooms at 95% of the list price. They sell about ½ of their rooms through their own marketing efforts, and they sell the other ½ through affiliate sites like ours: DiscountHotelUSA.com. How this part of the affiliate program works is, Hotels.com gives us access to their database and every time someone books a room on DiscountHotelusa.com we get 5% of the total room booking.

The three major advantages of this type of system:  

• Economy of scale in advertising
  
• Automated Real Time Booking
  
• No need to manage rates, once block is sold. 

The major disadvantages are:  

• They take 30% of your profits.
  
• They train users to use their system to book rooms, not yours
   

Commission based models: 

The commission based model is very simple and works as follows. Your property signs up for their program and you are given a login and password to the back-end of their system. Once in their back-end you are allowed to manage your inventory and supply via a web interface. Once a room is consumed you must pay your provider around 10% of the total you received for the room. Another nice thing about this model is that once you are signed up you can place a private labeled booking engine on your hotel’s web site that lets consumers book directly from there, and the private label keeps the look and feel of your web-site during the booking process. The commission model players such as, Travelnow.com (owned by Hotels.com) and WorldRes.com don’t book as many rooms, and don’t have quite the affiliate network of the bigger merchant ones, but are better suited to smaller properties.

The three major advantages of this type of system:  

• Can control rates and inventory in real time
  
• Typically you get to keep more of the revenue generated from selling rooms
  
• Private label booking engine can increase your brand equity

The major disadvantages are:

• Man hours needed to control rates and availability
  
• Smaller distribution network to sell rooms through

Cost and the Development Process:

There are so many answers to the question "How much will this cost and how long will it take?" Most of the factors will depend on the quality of your existing marketing material, the resources of your organization, and exactly what you want. In the initial stages of providing our clients a concrete answer to these question we will explain the process, what you can do to lower the costs, and the steps necessary to make the project a success. If you would like us to control almost all aspects of the design process we can do that too. If you would like more information on the actual design process our extensive help section has numerous tutorials and can be accessed at: 

www.NolaWebMasters.com/Help/   or by Clicking Here

Thank your for your time. Once again please contact us if you have any questions, or visit our main business site at www.NolaWebMasters.com.

Craig Steelman,
Account Manager
504.899.1987
email@nolawebmasters.com