1. RELATION
BETWEEN OTA
AND HOTELS

2. What is an OTA:
• With general public access to the Internet, many airlines
and other travel companies began to sell directly to
passengers. As a consequence, airlines no longer
needed to pay the commissions to travel agents on
each ticket sold. Since 1997, travel agencies have
gradually been disintermediated, by the reduction in
costs caused by removing layers from the package
holiday distribution network.[9][10] However, travel
agents remain dominant in some areas such as cruise
vacations where they represent 77% of bookings and
73% of packaged travel. In 2009, the market size for
travel agencies experienced a sharp decline, dropping
from $17 billion the previous year to $14.5 billion.

3. • In response, travel agencies have developed an internet
presence of their own by creatingtravel websites, with
detailed information and online booking capabilities. Several
major online travel agencies include: Expedia, Voyages-
sncf.com, Travelocity, Orbitz, CheapTickets, Priceline,
CheapOair, and Hotwire.com. Travel agencies also use the
services of the major computer reservations systems
companies, also known as Global Distribution Systems (GDS),
including: SABRE, Amadeus CRS, Galileo CRS and Worldspan,
which is a subsidiary of Travelport, allowing them to book and
sell airline tickets, hotels, car rentals and other travel related
services. Some online travel websites allow visitors to compare
hotel and flight rates with multiple companies for free. They
often allow visitors to sort the travel packages by amenities,
price, and proximity to a city or landmark

4. List of the main OTA
• ebookers.com
Started out as the flight-orientated online service of the
fares consolidator, Flightbookers, but is now a true 'travel
portal' where you can search for everything from country
cottages to cruises, train tickets to transfers.
• eDreams
Spanish travel portal selling flights, car hire, hotels and self-
catering accommodation. It was originally launched in
March 99 (and based in the USA) when they specialised in
unusual hard-to-find holidays with practical help from 400

5. • 'DreamGuides' –
online travel experts who would answer specific queries about where to go and what to do by email.
• Expedia
The first major eAgency, launched by Microsoft in the US in the early 90's, then in the UK & Europe a couple of
years later (Nov 98). It is amazingly comprehensive & versatile, and is the largest seller of travel online in the
world.
• Iglu
Iglu started life as a specialist ski web site selling ski accommodation, but has now diversified into several
niche site: igluSki.com, igluVillas.com, igluTropical.com & igluCities.com, all accessible from the main
iglu.com site. There used to be an igluActive.com too, selling activity breaks, but that seems to have
disappeared.
• JustTheTicket
Discount airfares, Car Hire, Hotels, Eurotunnel, Eurostar, Fly-Drive, city breaks and late holiday deals. Search
online, then book on the phone.
• Key2Holidays
Online operator specialising in luxury holidays to Dubai, Italy, America, Africa and the Far East, and tailor
made trips all over the world.
• LastMinute.com
Famous home of late-availability holidays. If you are looking for excellent bargains and really can drop
everything and go at a moment's notice, this is the place to look. Over the years Lastminute has gobbled up
the major competition so it operates all the Online Travel Corporation (OTC) brands, Travelocity (originally
Sabre on the www), and Holiday Autos.
• Netflights.com
Popular flights and hotel aggregator. It was originally launched as the Airline Network PLC in the early
nineties, but the name was changed in 2008 when its parent company was aquired by the Thomas Cook

6. • Group. Netflights
offer deals on flights, hotels, holidays and car hire to thousands of global destinations. Holidays purchased
throught it are ABTA protected.
• Opodo:
This is the online travel company created by nine European airlines - Aer Lingus, Air France, Alitalia, Austrian
Airlines, British Airways, Finnair, Iberia, KLM and Lufthansa. The site offers not just cheap airfares but also hotels
car hire and package holidays from operators such as Kuoni;If you are wondering about the name; they
needed something that worked in up to nine different languages and for nine different cultures. It is also a
visual palindrome. Turn it upside down and it looks the same. (I was at the launch in 2002 when they
explained it! A.)
• PackYourBags.com
Online agency since 2001, ABTA & ATOL bonded, selling budget holidays in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean,
the Americas, India & the Indian Ocean from the major tour operators including Thomas Cook, First Choice,
Airtours, Sunset and Cosmos.
• Priceline.co.uk
Hotels, flights car rental, the usual stuff...but, Priceline's business model is based on its Name Your Own Price
system which allows you nominate the price you would like to pay for a hotel, flight or car rental and it then
searches its database of partner companies looking for unsold seats, rooms or cars that they are willing to sell
at that price. While that system still applies to almost 30,000 hotel rooms, we can't see much evidence of it
being applied to flights and cars, which seem to be sourced the traditional way. They also have a review
system called PillowTalk – a ‘word cloud’ that displays words of different sizes according to how many times
they have been mentioned by customer reviews. These words are taken from over 300,000 reviews submitted
by genuine guests who have booked and stayed at a hotel through Priceline.

7. • Telme Global Traveller
A well-constructed site, simple to use, offering flights, hotels & car
hire, biased towards mid to longhaul flights and the business
traveller market.
• ThisIsTravel
Travel portal launched at the start of 2002 by the Mail, Mail on
Sunday, Evening Standard, and Metro group of newspapers.
Most of the content (such as Frank Barrett's advice column)
seems to be culled from their existing travel pages online. A
flights/insurance/hotels/car-hire booking engine turns the site into
a 'portal'.
• Trainbreaks.com
City breaks via Eurostar. Part of Delpech Travel, so a sister brand
to seafranceholidays.com, ferrydiscounts.com and

8. • Trainbreaks.com
City breaks via Eurostar. Part of Delpech Travel, so a
sister brand to seafranceholidays.com,
ferrydiscounts.com and shortbreakmarket.co.uk.
• TravelPlanners
A division of USAirtours group, selling flights,
accommodation, car hire, airport parking, short
breaks and holidays.

9. OTA and Hotels
• All travel sites that sell hotels online work together with GDS, suppliers and hotels directly to search for
room inventory. Once the travel site sells a hotel, the site will try to get a confirmation for this hotel. Once
confirmed or not, the customer is contacted with the result. This means that booking a hotel on a travel
website will not necessarily result in an instant answer. Only some hotels on a travel website can be
confirmed instantly (which is normally marked as such on each site). As different travel websites work
with different suppliers together, each site has different hotels that it can confirm instantly. Some
examples of such online travel websites that sell hotel rooms are Expedia, Orbitz and WorldHotel-Link.
• The comparison sites, such as Kayak.com, TripAdvisor and SideStep search the resellers site all at once to
save time searching. None of these sites actually sell hotel rooms.
• Often tour operators have hotel contracts, allotments and free sell agreements which allow for the
immediate confirmation of hotel rooms for vacation bookings.
• Mainline service providers are those that actually produce the direct service, like various hotels chains or
airlines that have a website for online bookings. Portals will serve a consolidator of various airlines and
hotels on the internet. They work on a commission from these hotels and airlines. Often, they provide
cheaper rates than the mainline service providers as these sites get bulk deals from the service
providers. A meta search engine on the other hand, simply culls data from the internet on real time
rates for various search queries and diverts traffic to the mainline service providers for an online booking.
These websites usually do not have their own booking engine.