Individual hotels and small hotel chains often cannot afford the expense of these direct connections and turn to other companies to provide the connections. Several large online travel sites are, in effect, travel agencies. These sites send the hotels’ information and rates downstream to literally thousands of online travel sites, most of which act as travel agents. They can then receive commission payments from the hotels for any business booked on their websites. An increasing number of hotels are building their own websites to allow them to market their hotels directly to consumers. Non-franchise chain hotels require a “booking engine” application to be attached to their website to permit people to book rooms in real time. One advantage of booking with the hotel directly is the use of the hotel’s full cancellation policy as well as not needing a deposit in most situations. The online booking engine applications are supported by Content management system(CMS). To improve the likelihood of filling rooms, hotels tend to use several of the above systems. The content on many hotel reservation systems is becoming increasingly similar as more hotels sign up to all the sites. Companies thus have to either rely on specially negotiated rates with the hotels and hotel chains or trust in the influence of search engine rankings to draw in customers.
In the United Kingdom hotels are rated from one star to five stars. The RAC pulled out of accommodation grading in 2008 so the only grading schemes in operation are those operated by the AA (Automobile Association) and the national tourist boards: Visit England, Visit Wales, the Scottish Tourist Board and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. The schemes were all ‘harmonised’ to ensure consistency between the schemes. This applies to all accommodation types apart from self-catering that the AA started offering in 2009. The AA criteria are available on its website. In addition to the usual black stars (ranging from one (the lowest) to five (the highest), the AA awards red stars to the highest-rated, which are deemed ‘Inspectors’ Choice’. Each of the national tourist boards have grading explanations on their web sites. In the Philippines, the Department of Tourism has an accreditation system for hotels, apartment hotels and resorts.
Where do you start? Start with yourself. The easiest way to start off is to pretend your best friend wants to go too, and you are now telling her all about your trip all the way to the finest details. Talk about things like why did you travel and who did you travel with. Were you in town on business or as a tourist? Did you travel solo, with kids or with friends? Did you have your dog with you and how your pet was treated? When did you travel? Peak season or off-season? Was it easy to book? Was the price reasonable? Also, it is a good idea to let your readers know how often you travel so your reviews can be “weighted”. If you have traveled all over the world for years and the hotel you are reviewing is the best you have ever stayed at, this has more weight than if this is your first ever trip abroad.
Next year for sure we are going to have the Qatar Masters. The sponsors are very happy with how the things went this year and we had some very good reviews. During the first four days we had 1.6 million visitors to watch the games. Overall, I think it’s easier to organize a closed Round-Robin tournament, but what we are doing here is giving a chance and opportunity to everybody to come and play against strong opponents and fight for the prizes. I hope that one day we can increase the prize fund. SS: A million dollars? MAM: Why not? I am sure we will reach there one day. As of now we would like to think about things that we could improve for the next year’s edition. Getting TV coverage will help to increase the popularity of the event. So that is an idea. The third edition is a long way off, so I will think about it in peace!
