New discount site for hotel rooms

BOOKING HOTELS:A NEW hotel booking service offering discounts of up to 50 per cent on room rates has been launched in Ireland.

The hotwire.com website provides last-minute hotel deals to consumers and has rooms available in more than 2,450 cities worldwide at any given time.

It does deals with some of the world’s leading hotels which allows the hotels to sell unsold rooms at reduced rates without advertising the discounts on their websites or other public forums, a move which many hotels fear would damage their brands and anger guests who booked at higher prices.

“Rooms are offered in a shielded way so hotels do not have to publically offer them at heavily discounted rates,” the company’s president Clam Bason told The Irish Times this week. “They don’t want to do that to their brands for a number of reasons, including fears that if they advertise heavy discounts on their websites customers who have already booked will simply cancel and book at the cheaper rates,” he said.

Bason said that across Europe on most nights around a third of all hotel rooms are empty and this was “a huge opportunity for people who want to take a trip but who otherwise might not be able to afford it”.

Bason says the site, which is owned by online travel giant expedia.com, offers an average discount of 35 per cent but, he claims, that discounts of over 50 per cent are commonly found.

He said setting up in Ireland had presented the site with “a chicken and egg scenario. The hotels will say that we need customers and the customers will say that we need rooms so we really have to get both at the same time.” With that in mind the company will launch a big advertising push in May.

The recession, he said, both in the US and in Ireland, has seen people dabble in money saving initiatives. “Austerity is the buzzword now and it has seen people try new products which offer discounts, so the timing of this launch is good.”