With hotels seeing a big bounce in bookings, so too can they expect to see more so-called rogue rates creeping back. These are rates that they’ve not authorized, and are a common complaint. Now one of the major bedbank players has developed a platform to help hotels fix any rogue rates they spot.
WebBeds, the accommodation marketplace owned by Australia’s Webjet, has launched a tool called Parity Monitor. It will first act as a hub where hotels can submit parity discrepancies to WebBeds, which connects accommodation providers to a network of 44,000 offline and online travel buyers.
It’s just the first phase of a program, as later it will let its hotel partners track, monitor, report back and eventually resolve rate discrepancies. WebBeds also said it had set up a centralised team dedicated to resolving parity issues.
“WebBeds is very aware of the frustrations that our hotel partners experience when there are rate parity discrepancies in the market,” said WebBeds CEO Daryl Lee.
Expedia Group and Marriott International have already partnered to curb the practice, and last year said they’d reduced the unauthorized distribution of wholesale hotel rates across metasearch websites by 80 percent.