booking .com

[afx]

Anyone using this bunch ? How do their comissions stack up against LateRooms ?

They seem to be a lot bigger than Laterooms, definately have wider hotel coverage and apparently do 100,000 nights per day.

 

[peacock]

Friend of mine works in the industry and says that booking.com, hotels.com and laterooms.com are the ones that seriously convert / do volume.

Laterooms seems good for UK destinations and will be getting more and more beach stuff I guess since they are owned by TUI.

Have you looked at hotelscombined ? it contains most the hotel booking sites in 1 search
Here is a white label I did with them - easy to set up, they also have plenty of search banners etc.

 

[afx]

Thanks for the info, used laterooms for quite a while but looking at booking .com, they have much more coverage globally and appear to offer better commissions. I will try them and post back results. Think I'd give hotels .com a miss, they are owned by expedia, seems like the pie would be getting cut to thinly, with them I'd be an affiliate of an affiliate of an affiliate..

 

[dougs]

hotel booking

Booking.com
Laterooms
Lastminute

The 3 of them convert better than anything else by miles.

Doug

 

[afx]

Thanks Doug, just been approved by booking. com. Will give it a go, nice they offer branding and options to alter search box aesthetics and dimensions.

Looks like their integration code needs some work though. Probably best just to do it all via xml as their default search banners keep showing results for US hotels in prominent positions for UK GEO's despite feeding the code and search box with the right info.

Laterooms worked reasonably well for the few sites I had it on, that is until IE8 was widely adopted and I've found I get zero bookings due to all this pop nonsense about regular or classic view then it shows results from all over the place.

Had a few conversions with lastminute but their creative’s being pink and black do not look too hot with a lot of sites colour schemes.

Booking. com must be doing something right to be getting 100,000 bookings a day. I believe that dwarfs the competition and one would hope with the economies of scale they could get better deals from the hoteliers and hopefully pass a larger margin onto the referrer. That said they're an American company which means they may be very greedy and have shoddy tracking and enjoy keeping a much bigger cut of the pie than the referrer gets. I hope they didn't graduate from the same school of ethics as snapnames ;-)

 

[dougs]

booking.com

They pay a percentage of the money they make....so generallt a percentage of about 15-17%. Compare it to laterooms normal deal of 5%.

We have worked with booking.com for years and the product does convert a treat

Doug

 

[Brassneck]

Is activehotels the same as booking.com?

Cheers
Stephen.

 

[dougs]

expedia

Domain Angel...Will go with you, but for whatever reason our hotel traffic has never converted with expedia.

We took the same traffic and over a period of time flicked it between each supplier and think we made 1 sale with expedia.....100 plus with booking and 50 with laterooms and lastminute

Travelodge is dream for uk cheap stuff,,,,,premier inn has just vanished recently.....but comission is awful

Doug

 

[peacock]

Domain Angel...Will go with you, but for whatever reason our hotel traffic has never converted with expedia.

We took the same traffic and over a period of time flicked it between each supplier and think we made 1 sale with expedia.....100 plus with booking and 50 with laterooms and lastminute

Travelodge is dream for uk cheap stuff,,,,,premier inn has just vanished recently.....but comission is awful

Doug

Hi Doug,

Have you tried the Expedia direct programme?.
Through the networks you get stuffed with the phone number all over the place but when direct you don't have to have it.

Thanks

 

[peacock]

Is activehotels the same as booking.com?

Cheers
Stephen.

Yes it is the same these days.

 

[peacock]

This year I have mostly been using Hotels Combined as they have most of the big names included in their search and as Doug will testify people love to compare prices. The search is nice and fast too.

The bit I'm not so keen on is the comm scheme is not transparent.

 

[dougs]

We did expedia direct a while ago and sent them huge huge amounts of traffic but always found them to be high and mighty.......and the traffic we sent was huge huge. always check my fingers in dealing with them,,,,alas the smell never goes away.

Comparators...oh yes we do like them

Doug