Online Travel Agents in USA are Benefited From Price Comparison Shoppers

Hoteliers, Airlines and Specialized Excursion portals gained a lot of business in the last 5 years period. But now they are loosing their ground versus online travel agencies (OTAs) those who are using Online Travel Agency Software in a better and advanced way. Also the supplier share of unique monthly hotel and air bookers are declining, as both Inbound and Outbound travel agents are benefited from price-conscious comparison shoppers having direct aggregated rates from aggregators, consolidators and bigger inventory wholesalers.

According to a USA travel & hospitality report hotel websites usually had an authority of 60-70% of monthly online hotel bookings. However, hotel website share dropped substantially to 50% in United States markets. Not only that, some of the air bookings share also shifted to the online travel agency channel in the same destinations. Both online traffic and third party conversions played a greater roll in the share shift.

Historically supplier websites had substantially higher conversion rates than OTAs across products; a reverse trend has appeared over the past few years. Now OTA conversion has enhanced while supplier conversion has turned down to a large extent. The fall in conversion rates among hotel and airline websites was likely the consequence of supplier-driven price increases in last few years. The raise of business travel provoked suppliers to increase rates, but the leisure customers were not so ready to pay those higher prices, and online travel agencies gathered the settlement of their sympathy.

Although last year brought increased revenue across hotel and airline products, traffic to most transactional groupings reduced. Traffic is likely to increase in the mid of 2011 as leisure travel is looking to bounce back, and suppliers will have to play a cautious and mutual role to regain lost share while increasing prices.

Online business products such as air, hotel, excursions and car rentals are followed to survey the dynamic between supplier sites and OTAs, as well as how static and non-transactional sites like on-request, deal publishers and review sites play their roles in this Hospitality & Tourism Industry scenario. The two other decisive metrics would be online traffic and percentage of successful conversion percentage from them.