Booking.com has made a concerted effort to expand its presence in the business travel market, with Josh Wood presiding over its many new partnerships. During the past 18 months, the online travel agency has inked deals with global distribution systems, including Amadeus and Sabre, partnered with the corporate booking platform Roomex, and either added or expanded its relationships with all the major travel management companies and several small and midsize ones, too. It also made an $11.2 million investment in the business travel and expense technology company Serko, which integrated Booking.com content into its Zeno online booking tool, and Booking.com will promote Zeno to its business travelers.
One obvious reason behind Booking.com's expansion into business travel is to capture more customers. And whether travel managers like it or not, a certain percentage of their travelers are already booking on Booking.com, so they may as well have the content available to them through their OBTs. When Booking.com content is included alongside the existing travel program content, Wood said, and the negotiated rate is still at the top, the attachment rate rises. "We see there is a higher adoption rate in the travel program than before, because [the traveler] no longer has to come to Booking.com to see what [they] are missing out on," Wood said. "And many times our logo is there, so people know that our content is there."
Some travel managers have complained that including such OTA content in the OBT hurts the traveler, citing that users might not get loyalty points or certain amenities that have been included in corporate negotiated rates. Wood disputed that. "If a corporate traveler books a Booking.com rate, it means we either had a better price or more availability when they made the booking," he said. "What we see is even within chain properties, we are the last to be turned off. We have last-room availability, [even] when your existing travel program doesn't and when your negotiated rate is blacked out. And if you really think about it, are those loyalty points or ‘free water' really free when the rate might be, say, $50 higher per night?"
He also challenged the issue that business travelers don't know what they are getting when they book a Booking.com room. "If there is a problem with clarity of what is included in [our] rate and what is not, you need to talk to your OBT, because it's their fault," he said. "Our API pushes out all of that information. It's abundantly clear what is included in every single rate. If your OBT doesn't support that, they need to upgrade or you need to move to one that can."