The New Way to Book Your Travels

Brent Gresham

February 4, 2005

Hosp. Mrkt. Prof. Guillory

The New Way to Book Your Travels

In December's e-issue of 4 Hoteliers.com, the article "Give the People what they want - Airfare and Car Rentals from your Hotels website," by Richard Getz, elaborates on the new selling techniques in which major hotel corporations are incorporating into their websites. The customer will be able to book his/her hotel room, airline ticket as well as their rental car all at the same time and on the same website as a package. Though you might think you are booking your package with that company, you are really booking it through a "middle man" company called AirDepartment.com. Really the hotels website is linked directly with AirDepartment.com, who is the real one booking the flight, your rental car and your lodging accommodations.

This incentive for the customer of having to book all of their travel arrangements at the same time has proved to be quite enticing because of the steady increase in internet sales for booking travel arrangements all at once. The "Big Dogs" of the hotel world such as Westin, Marriott, Sheraton, Four Points, St. Regis, and Holiday Inn to name a few, have this new service on their websites and the sales have been increasing steadily.

The company AirDepartment.com is also establishing itself in the travel world to be a partner, not a competitor for hotel corporations. As being a partner for hotels, the company hopes to seek the future contracts with other large dominating hotel chains such as Hilton, Best Western and Intrastate Hotels.

This article relates much to what we talk about in class because it is another strategy in which sales companies are enticing travelers. How they entice these travelers? They entice them because of the pure convenience of booking all travel arrangements at once on the same website. As of right now AirDepartment.com I think targets the business travelers more so than other kinds of travelers, but I can see that changing in the near future. More and more travelers are booking their travel arrangement online and now with the beauty of booking everything at once, whatever category you might fall under as a traveler, eventually you will find the satisfaction of booking all at once. Great