The scale of boutique hotels demands that they are manned and managed by a small team. While their hotel teams are typically passionate about their property and destination they often do not come from corporate or professional hospitality backgrounds. The hotel will not have the budget to employ dedicated sales, revenue and yield management teams and their rate strategy and management of offline and online rates suffers as a consequence of this.
As a small independent hotel, working alone, their resources to penetrate markets and leverage exposure are greatly limited. Additionally, as a result of their small inventory, their reach to guests (through the number of guests staying with them per year) is also limited, further restricting their reach and access to market.
The hotel’s websites are often simple and with the design based on aesthetics over practicality, the result being that they are often a poor resource for working travel agents.
Due to the disconnect between online and offline rates and the often lack of understanding of how the professional travel trade works, travel agents are often provided with rates that are uncompetitive with the hotel’s online rates driving the travel agent to source bookings for the hotel via the hotel’s OTA (wholesale) partners.
OTAs further damage the hotel’s ability to sell direct both to B2C and B2B through breaking parity, making booking with the hotel the more expensive choice by adjusting the rates channel managed to them down a percent or two, often within the currency conversion algorithms.
