300,000 Additional Hotels | 3. Improving the Pricing
This is part 3 of the 300,000 Additional Hotels Series, which focuses on the implications of our new partnership announced earlier.
In part 1 of our series, we outlined that we are expanding to many new destinations around the world (including ones in the smallest cities).
In part 2, we then focused on how we are improving our inventory within individual destinations (in order to offer customers as many options as possible).
In this third part, we want to discuss the improved competitiveness in terms of pricing that we expect to achieve as a result of the new inventory.
The Region of Asia
Our current inventory, which consist of more than 100,000 hotels around the world, is already very competitive and undercuts conventional booking sites significantly.
Earlier this year, we conducted an extensive price comparison analysis between LockTrip, Booking.com and Agoda.com through 800 randomly selected hotels.
The results were very encouraging. We managed to provide average savings of around 17% in Europe and more than 23% in the USA.
However there was one weak spot we discovered. While we were still quite competitive, our savings in the region of Asia were significantly lower compared to Europe and the USA. This showed us that there is room for improvement.
In order to offer consistent price savings on a truly global level, we had to further work on this weak spot and aim for partnerships that strengthen us specifically in this region.
As a result of our dedicated work process towards those goals, we now expect to become significantly more competitive in the region of Asia.
New Types of Inventory
Our current inventory has already a great coverage in terms of quality hotels with high bed capacities. However those hotels tend to be in the 3 to 5 star category, which is only one part of the hotels landscape.
With our new inventory, we will be radically expanding the diversity of hotels on our marketplace. More specifically, our offerings will range down to the 2 and 1 star hotels, as well as unrated hostels.
We are unlocking a completely new customer base that can not afford higher priced hotels or does prefer a more casual environment.
Pricing at the Room Level
So far, one of our core strategies has been to make sure that LockTrip offers lower prices at the overall hotel level. For any given hotel, our mission was it to be especially competitive at the lowest priced room of that particular hotel. This way we were able to demonstrate a clear savings structure across the landscape and showcase that it is indeed possible to undercut the lowest prices of conventional booking sites.
With our new inventory, we are now targeting to optimize the price structure across all room types. While we were already quite strong across room types, we are now moving on to optimize those price structures to improve our competitiveness on the room level.
So far, we were especially competitive at the hotel level. With the new inventory, we will further improve our pricing at the room level.
Summary of the Series
With the new inventory…
- … we will unlock many new destinations, that were not available on our marketplace before
- … we will have available offerings even in the smallest cities and the lesser known regions of the world
- … our customers will have many more options to choose from within a city or region
- … we will unlock new types of inventory, including 2 and 1 star hotels or hostels
- … the pricing structure will become significantly more competitive on the room level as well as on the hotel level
- … we will become much stronger in the region of Asia
We are still on track to achieve this important milestone by the end of this year. It will transform our marketplace into a very competitive and truly global player in the travel industry.
Part 1 of the series: Expanding to New Destinations
Part 2 of the series: Improving Inventory within Destinations
LockTrip is the first marketplace with 0% commission where you can save on average 20% on your hotel and rental bookings compared to anywhere else. Learn how to buy LOC tokens to enable access to our marketplace and its lower prices here!
