OTA Contracted Rates, Meta Search, and Merchant Model Programs give preferred placement on major Online Travel Agencies.
Online Travel Agents (OTAs) including Hotwire, Priceline, Orbitz, Hotels.com, etc. offer participation in OTA Contract Rate programs.
These programs, sometimes referred to as “net rate” programs, are direct contracts between your property and an OTA that enable the OTA to act as the ‘merchant’ to the traveler.
They give your property preferred placement, including additional marketing information, and more images. Contract Rate programs can be a strong source of bookings.
Detailed info on the 'Meta Search' channels provides connectivity can be found here under the section "Meta Search Engines'. The most important one isGoogle Hotels, to which BookingCenter is a certified partner for delivering real-time rates and availability. The key concept for participating in this program is that your Google Hotel Price will be maintained with automatic rates, availability, and booking data specific to this important channel. The bookings will be clearly identified as 'Google' using the Agent allocation model our users are familiar with. Google will not require an AdWord purchase nor a commission to be paid for these bookings. If a property wishes to buy AdWords themself to increase relevance in their market, or use a third-party marketing company to do so, the BookingCenter feed will support this and track the 'ROI' of the campaign as part of our Google Analytics support.
Your profile on Google will look like this example once you are live and we are allocating your rates and availability:
A full page search may yield a view like this:
If you wish us to activate your Google Hotels profile, contact Sales.
Our channel manager gives you complete control over allocating unique rates and availability to each OTA channel.