I have to admit that this may sound like a crazy statement. But then think, think twice, and it is not as funny as it seems.
Remember the times when we did not have any mobiles, no i-pads or i-phones, no tablets. Internet did exist but in 1997 when I started the Phileas Fogg, it was only for the happy few.
I recruited my guests through magazine articles writing the best about me, travel guides calling me a vivid traveller and a single mom, a dog lover’s paradise and the deco
‘ quirky’. There was then and still an organization sponsored by the Brussels Government , poorly staffed and speaking only French, that would take ‘our’ reservations granted we dropped them a high commission.
Yet things were on the move and the notion of businesses, big and small, needing their own website as a window on the world was growing.
Tony used to be the housekeeper at Boël, a Belgian company with headquarters right opposite the Parc de Warande. I met Tony walking my dog Cheops. Bored and ‘jobless’ during the day but a computer fanatic, Tony proposed to build my first website.
Three months later however, I had had not one single client coming to me through my website. These were medieval times when it comes to informatics: tags, SEO-optimisation…. Unheard of.
I decided to grasp the nettle and went surfing the net. #BedandBreakfast.com had just been launched as a database for b&b’s and small hotels and also allowed for online booking. I took the risk paying the substantial annual membership fee. Being a #Bedandbreakfast.com member was an instant success. I received reservations from Ghana, Nigeria, Burundi … only when I wanted to debit the credit card I was given for a deposit, I was kindly asked to ‘seize the credit card’, with the additional message ‘credit card stolen’.
For months I remained clueless as to why they would book and then never show up. Till an early wake-up call from the federal police made it all clear it had to do with visa requirements. As long as an African could give prove of a valid hotel reservation, obtaining a visa to Europe would be easy. And granted, booking online with a stolen credit card appeared to be the perfect way.
Next came the booking engines: expedia, venere, trivago, hostelworld …… and booking.com. With time, thanks to mergers and aggressive marketing campaigns and with the help of high commission income, they progressed . The world seemed to be turned upside down. Online booking engines became ‘incontournable’ for travellers and hoteliers alike.
Whilst I never kept statistics, I know for a fact that the number of visitors who find me via an online booking engine has kept growing constantly. What many of those visitors do not know, - how can they !, - is we pay a high commission. So indirectly they do too.
For Brussels, the minimum commission per booking amounts to 15% . Rumors have it that in Wallony the commission is as high as 25% !
I have no problem paying for a service that proves itself essential . The problem lies in the fact that
1. these commissions are high compared to the distribution of time and effort and means that go in generating a booking. 15% or more for the booking engine with the remaining 85% or less for the hotel that pays taxes, personnel, maintenance and running charges and is responsible for delivering the product: making sure the guest has a pleasant stay.
2 2. the obligation by Booking.com to guarantee a booking.com customer the best price for a particular room. Basically this means we hoteliers cannot advertise a better price on our own websites or on the occasion of a promotion.
3. hotels are invoiced at the end of each month; if the hotel happens to be 2 weeks late in paying the unwelcome invoice, - as was my case, - the hotel is suspended from their pages until the hotel pays the total sum of the three highest invoices of the previous 12 months as a deposit. With competition in the hotel sector being ferocious and the financial crisis in Europe hitting us all, our profit margins have dropped from cream to skimmed milk . Unless you want to abide to the mafioso booking.com rules by all means, this is an impossible thing to do …. And to accept.
Booking.com is not the only booking engine charging a commission , but they are by far the worst. They sit on a monopolistic island, allowing them to impose the highest commissions in the sector, then on top of this demand hotels post their best rates on Booking.com and to wind you up in a rigid system of punishment and penalties if you go wrong even only once. Given all this not only do they act like the Italian mafia, in fact they are worse.
There is some good news too. #UniversalPoints was recently launched and already now proves to be a big hit. Basically, it is a platform to find hotels directly AND whereby at the end of your stay you are encouraged to claim back 5% of the spent amount.
Traveller wherever you are, be aware ! Find us on the Booking.com , UniversalPoints , or other.
We promise you, you’ll receive our first class treatment !
