Is Trivago Coming
Is Trivago Coming?
Like many people we have been watching the onslaught of television advertising featuring the hotel price comparison sites such as Trivago and HotelsCombined, expecting a rush of hotels asking us how they work. In fact we have not had many enquiries about this until fairly recently, so we thought we better share what we know.
These sites compare rates across all the Online Travel Agents ie Expedia/EasytoBook/Orbitz/HRS etc. (If you wonder why the public would bother when in theory most hotels are supposed to be applying rate parity.....so are we!) If you check your own hotels listing you may well find other OTA's listed there that you have never heard off. These may be companies who are affiliates of the major OTA's (Yes the OTA's can take your rooms and parse it out to other websites/companies, giving them a share of the revenue from any subsequent bookings).
From a Hotels perspective it is probably useful to think of these sites as they do TripAdvisor. ie Get a username and login and keep your details up to date!!!. Getting access to your Trivago listing seems to be fairly simple if you are using an e mail address based on your hotel website address. ie if your website address is www.pineviewhotel.com and you register with the e mail address sales@pineviewhotel.com you are likely to be given access pretty quickly.
Once in, just like TripAdvisor you can edit your photos, facilities and description. Interestingly you can elect to pay for a 'Pro' Account (Equivalent to TripAdvisor Business Listing), this will allow you to add news, and enter your contact details such as Address, Phone Number and Website Address. In the examples we have seen this 'Pro' Account seemed to be surprisingly cheap ie 30$ per Month for a 55 room hotel.
Like TripAdvisor you can also elect to have the rates from your own website displayed alongside the OTA's, you pay for this on a cost per click basis, ie You pay a fee if someone actually clicks on the rates. However we have not seen a big take up amongst hotels for TripConnect (For what it is worth the top 2 selling hotels in the AccuBook System ARE using TripConnect), so we are not sure there will be big demand for this feature on Trivago.
To Summarise - make sure you have claimed ownership of your property on Trivago, update your details, consider signing up for a Pro Account.
(If you have anything to add to the above feel free to reply to us or post it on our FaceBook Page. https://www.facebook.com/accubook )