Hotels and Airlines are like Restaurants….

We thought this comment by Onsite Consulting (www.onsiteconsulting.com) in a recent Gerson Lehrman report was worth noting and could be applicable to the restaurant community:

“Hotels/Airlines when the large aggregators or portal sites became a large provider of traffic often paid little attention to their own online reservation systems and had justification based on the increase in traffic from the aggregator. As margins declined and the aggregators had more leverage based on the hotels/airlines giving them their customers we saw a swing back to the hotel/airline pushing for customers to reserve through their own portal. Some airlines/hotels in fact offered poorer service standards to aggregator purchased flights/stays to added benefits to guests that booked directly. Some have gone as far as to no longer use such systems and have invested significant dollars repurchasing their own customers.”