Saturday, March 28, 2009

Another Cash Opportunity For Agents

OneMinuteBooking.com, an agent-only, passport-protected booking site, has given travel agents a new way to fatten their profit margins by introducing net rates on all of the 13,000 hotels in its inventory.


Agents can book these net rates and then add their own service fee, which is bundled into the hotel price displayed to their clients so that clients don’t see the service fee. To help agents calculate a fee, OneMinuteBooking has a function that lets agents quickly compare their rates against those of such online agencies as Expedia to see how competitive their quote is, enabling them to adjust accordingly.


The site requires prepayment 30 days before check-in. Agents can opt to pay and then collect the money from their clients. Agents input a credit card number—theirs or the clients—at the time they make the reservation, but OneMinuteBooking does not apply the charge until 30 days out.


OneMinuteBooking.com works with 13,000 hotels and has “Best Value” relationships with 220 of them, though properties are continually added. The company has purchased room blocks from these hotels, essentially guaranteeing them. The rates are very competitive, with a few blackout periods and some limitations. Usually, the room must be reserved at least 24 hours in advance, and in some markets, such as Las Vegas, the room must be reserved 72 hours in advance.


“The way to think about these is as high margin opportunities,” says Lauren Volcheff, marketing director for Travel Holdings, which owns OneMinuteBooking.com. A sample price for the Peabody in Orlando was just under $120 on OneMinuteBooking compared with $317, with taxes, on Expedia, a 60 percent savings. Sometimes the price difference is 25 percent, sometimes 50 percent, but it is always competitive, leaving room for agents to add their fees while still providing competitive rates. All hotels are available at net rates; agents who want to stick to the traditional commission model can book commissionable rates instead.


Agents can look for hotels using a variety of criteria and views. The site shows hotels as they’re located on maps, complete with street names, and also gives satellite views. Site visitors can zoom around a hotel—as if they were in a virtual helicopter—to get a better understanding of the location.


Agents can search for a hotel by telling the search engine that they want to look for a hotel in a particular neighborhood in a destination. They can also search for hotels by star rating or by brand.


OneMinuteBooking.com secures attractive rates because another of Travel Holdings’ subsidiaries is wholesaler Tourico Holidays. This company uses proprietary technology to negotiate inventory at competitive pricing, and passes the rates it negotiates as a wholesaler to travel agents.


Hotels are OneMinuteBooking.com’s bread and butter, but agents can also book vacation packages, roundtrip air, car rentals, destination attractions and transfers. The airline inventory includes low-cost carriers in the U.S. and overseas. Airline booking fees have been reduced, and the company says that its airfares are now the most competitive in the market. The company offers domestic and international packages that combine all airlines (including low-cost carriers) as well as all major cruise lines, and users have the ability to pick a cabin online thanks to direct connections with eight cruise lines. Its cruise-booking engine includes deck maps created by OneMinuteBooking.com. Agents can look at a map and see such details as how far a stateroom is from an elevator, and pick the one that is most convenient for their clients.
Volcheff says that OneMinuteBooking.com’s cruise fares are attractive to any agent who sells fewer than 200 cruises a year. “If you’re an agent booking more than 200 cruises a year, it’s probably worth it for you to go directly to the cruise line,” she says.


OneMinuteBooking.com serves more than 4,000 travel agents in the U.S. To register, go to OneMinuteBooking.com and click “New Agent.” That prompts staff from OneMinuteBooking.com to contact agents and issue a user name and password. Agents need IATA numbers to qualify.

Get your IATA number here.

No comments:

Post a Comment