On Channel Management

[Umran Hussain]

As far as I know there is currently no protocol or API for defining which OTAs have the right to sell which rooms or at which rates and commissions. I would like to know if it is within scope of the Winding Tree platform to provide a mechanism for determining channel rights and rates.

If it is, are you also considering implementing a way for hotels to (discreetly) provide different rates for the same room types to different channels?  I assume it would be in the interest of hotels to have as much price discrimination power as possible (provided they are not bound by rate-parity agreements), and it would make the platform that much more lucrative for hotels if you do end up facilitating this option.

Cheers,
Umran

[Lisa Simpkins]

Typically Commissions are confidential under contracts between parties.  No airline/hotel will ever disclose what they are paying in commissions or overrides to each distributor of their content. I wouldn't bank on a "commission" structure model as the future of this is very dim.  Fee based is more lucrative. 

Everyone major hotel chain is reducing commissions paid out. 

Warm regards,

Lisa K. Simpkins, CTC., CCTE. Trusted adviser - Global Business Travel Sales & Account Management | M & E | Travel Technology Mobile: (801) 560-1331 liza...@gmail.com

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[Umran Hussain]

Hi Lisa, thanks for pointing that out about the commissions. It certainly makes sense that hotels would want to keep their payouts to OTAs confidential and inaccessible to other OTAs and distributors. I originally wanted to find out if the Winding Tree platform would enable hotels to discriminate the fee/commissions they would charge depending on the specific OTA (in a confidential manner). I think it is reasonable for hotels to have preferred distribution partners, in which case a homogenous rate pricing model, which it currently is the case would not allow this sort of relationship.

[Dimitris Argirakis]

Two points: first windingtree and our blockchain implementation vision does not forsee any cooperation with OTAs. That will not make sense as Blockchain is decentralising (ditching) the middle man. Seondly: based on the current environment, individual hotels, or chain hotels, do indeed have confidential variable contracts with OTAs, but you must know that depending on the country and geographical area,these vary a lot. So windingtrees' API is not based on a sheme currently on place. Our vision is for hotels to use blockchain as a way of gaining their indipendance back from the OTAs, and subsequently, save on huge commsion amounts and make the distribution/exchange of data safer. 

Am Do., 14. Feb. 2019, 00:13 hat Lisa Simpkins <liza...@gmail.com> geschrieben:

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[Umran Hussain]

I don't necessarily see cooperation with OTAs as a violation of decentralization. I believe variable contracts facilitates an important market mechanism that would signal the quality of service (or more concretely, the marginal returns for the hotel) on the part of the OTA. With the introduction of Winding Tree there will be far less barriers to entry for new OTAs, so the sort of abuse of power that OTAs like Expedia and Booking used to enjoy as a result of their privileged access to obscure and proprietary APIs would be more or less mitigated. Since the influence that Expedia, Booking, etc. used to enjoy over consumers as a result of high technical transaction costs will be minimized, allowing hotels to have variable contracts between OTAs would allow OTAs to be rewarded based on their performance and would probably even incentivize them to optimize for performance. These are just some of my suspicions of course.

Best,
Umran

[Jirka Chadima]

Hi, thanks for an interesting discussion. My point of view is kind of technical so I won't go into any business details.

We tried to experiment with a similar thing during the Prague hackathon - not necessarily commision rates, but different non-public prices for selected partners.

  - Challenge: https://github.com/windingtree/wt-hackathon/issues/8

  - One approach: https://github.com/windingtree/wt-hackathon/blob/master/submissions/2018/sciant.md

  - Second approach: https://github.com/windingtree/wt-hackathon/blob/master/submissions/2018/UmbralMasters.%20Private%20offers%20for%20WT%20with%20NuCypher.md

So it looks like technically it can be done - the only different thing is the underlying datamodel. 

We believe more in the open data and we hope that the openness of the platform will bring more benefits than these particular deals. But since this might be of interest to some platform users, we might add something like this at some point. The key point here is though that the decision shall always be done by the property owners themselves. The platform itself can and should work without it just fine.

Jirka Chadima jiri.c...@fragaria.cz +420 607 258 316 https://fragaria.cz

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[Umran Hussain]

Hi Jirka,

Thanks for linking me to the proposed implementations. The proof of concept by the Sciant team is similar to what I had in mind, at least regarding the matter of personalized rate information. It is good to know that it is possible to do with minimal alterations in the existing data model. Please let me know what the core team eventually decides regarding this.

Best,
Umran