Priceline says some of the proceeds from its just-announced $500 million convertible-note offering may be used for corporate acquisitons, leading Susquehanna Financial Group to speculate that Priceline engineered the move because it may have felt it needed to match Expedia’s $1 billion warchest for future acquisitions.

Expedia and Priceline, of course, are at loggerheads across Europe and Asia over their respective hotel businesses. And, both companies would admit that Priceline has been the more solid executioner, so to speak.

In a note to investors from financial analysts Marianne Wolk and Malindi Davies, Susquehanna Financial Group argues that Priceline has a history of acquisitions, including Booking.com and Agoda, and that its future M & A activity may include broadening Priceline’s reach in Asia and Latin America, or diversifying its business by picking up a mobile company.

Susquehanna says a metasearch acquisition is a possibility, but less of a priority for Priceline.

Kayak would be “the only real target” for Priceline among the metasearchers, says Susquehanna, but such a transaction is doubtful because Priceline already gets a whole bunch of traffic from Kayak.

In fact, Susquehanna says, in January “Kayak was Priceline’s fifth largest source of traffic worldwide.”

Officials from both Expedia and Priceline have stated they would be open to opportunistic acquisitions in 2010, and now the two online kingmakers are building their respective warchests to make that happen.

Susquehanna’s views are consistent with the prevailing belief that consolidation among major online travel agencies is not on the immediate agenda.

Hotel-deals syndicator Travelscream plans to release at the end of this month a free iPhone app which would enable hotel partners to promote ancillary services, from spa treatments to dining and tours, to hotel guests before, during and after their stays.

For a flat fee, hoteliers would be able to use ancillary services’ content already loaded into Travelscream’s Social Media Toolkit dashboard or they can upload unpublished or additional offers targeted to particular guests or groups.

Travelscream co-founder and CEO Tom Griffin says hotel guests will receive a link to the iPhone app — which will be coming to Blackberry and Android devices, too — in their confirmation e-mails and the hotels get notified when a customer downloads the app.

Hotels can then offer consumers ancillary services on mobile devices before and durings their stays, and might even promote room specials after guests have completed their stays.

Griffin likens the Travelscream smartphone app to an opaque channel because hotels can offer guests unpublished inventory.

The app isn’t available yet to the public, but here’s a demo website.

This article is the first press mention of the app, and Travelscream officials plan to make an official announcement about it at Travelcom 2010 in Dallas next week.

Travelscream is offering licensing agreements with hotels at an introductory — but renewable rate — of $1,000 per year.

The licensing agreements involve no revenue share, Griffin says, adding “we didn’t want to get into the revenue share business.” Hotels keep all of the incremental revenue they earn through the app.

Developed by a third-party software company, the app is unique in the ancillary revenue opportunities it offers to the lodging industry, Griffin says.

Griffin says Travelscream has verbal commitments from several major U.S. hotel chains to participate in the service.

Online vacation-rental leader HomeAway broadened its reach and inventory mix with the purchase of BedandBreakfast.com for an undisclosed sum.

BedandBreakfast.com adds about 370,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Compete Inc., and about 10,000 inns to the HomeAway empire, which includes access to some 430,000 vacation rental properties across a bevy of domains, including HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, Homelidays.com and about a half-dozen others.

“As the theme of their Super Bowl ad and online video campaign has made clear, the largest player in the online vacation rental marketplace has set its competitive crosshairs squarely on hotels,” says Douglas Quinby, PhoCusWright senior director, research, and author of  ”Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change.”  ”This acquisition suggests that HomeAway is broadening their mission beyond vacation rentals to encompass more alternative leisure accommodation. Their marketing reach and in particular online marketing expertise should give a nice boost to an alternative category that is often overlooked, given the dominance of hotels in online travel.”

Quinby points out that HomeAway uses the high-margins listings model, which avoids the costs associated with transactions, fulfillment and customer support.

In that regard, HomeAway co-founder and CEO Brian Sharples says some innkeepers use BedandBreakfast.com technology for transactions, but the newly acquired business is listings-based at its core.

“Most of BedandBreakfast.com’s customers enjoy the ease of the the paid-listing model, just as the majority of HomeAway customers,” Sharples says. “The strength of the listing business at BedandBreakfast.com was one of the many attractive aspects of this business that made it a perfect fit for HomeAway.”

Expedia’s TripAdvisor, too, has a fledgling listings business in the form of TripAdvisor Business Listings for hotels, as well as vacation-rental listings through Expedia’s stake in FlipKey.

HomeAway’s acquisition of BedandBreakfast.com gets a little sticky because BedandBreakfast.com has distribution relationships for innkeepers with Expedia and Travelocity, although the two online travel agencies’ vacation-rental businesses are dimunitive when compared with HomeAway’s.

Expedia spokeswoman Katie Deines Fourcin says, “Our relationship with Bedandbreakfast.com is a supply agreement through which Expedia and Hotels.com offer Bedandbreakfast.com properties, and we don’t expect  HomeAway’s acquisition to have any impact on the agreement.”

Privately held HomeAway is rumored to be mulling an IPO, although the company denies anything is in the works at the moment.

Buying BedandBreakfast.com and broadening its inventory base, especially if HomeAway sticks with its listings model, is one approach to making investors more enthusiastic about a public offering, Quinby says.

Sharples of HomeAway says the company plans to operate BedandBreakfast.com as an independent brand, and he added that the acquired company’s 50 employees will not be subject to layoffs. [HomeAway has some 540 employees.]

Asked who HomeAway’s main competition is, Sharples doesn’t even mention any online travel agencies.

“On the supply side, HomeAway primarily competes with local or regional websites,” Sharples says. “On the demand side, we consider our biggest competitors to be branded hotels and resorts.”

And, that is what the BedandBreakfast.com acquisition is all about: giving consumers another lodging alternative to hotels and resorts.

Just ask the Griswolds.

If you work for a hotel or cruise line and you are attending the Pest Management Canada 2010 conference in Ottawa starting on Thursday, chances are you won’t be tweeting too much about it.

Bed-bug infestation is a touch-and-go problem for hotels and conference organizers state: “Due to the sensitivity of this issue, attendees will also be provided opportunities to ask questions of the expert instructors anonymously and meet with trained professionals to address site-specific questions in a confidential fashion.”

The annual, three-day event, hosted at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier, is organized by the National Pest Management Association, the Canadian Pest Management Association and the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations.

The main conference is designed for pest control companies, but a one-day Bed Bug Symposium Friday will be geared for hotels, cruise-ship administrators, hospitals and apartment managers.

The organizers cite “industry research” showing a 71% increase in bed-bug calls to pest management companies since 2001.

Of course, if your hotel, cruise ship or hospital has a bed-bug infestation or incident, keeping it hush-hush is paramount, according to some.

In that regard, the keynote address by Dini Miller of the Virginian Polytechnic Institute State University promises that “identification, inspection and prevention tips will be provided, along with suggestions for dealing with incidents and staying out of the media.” [my italics]

The main conference will feature helpful sessions on “Maggot Mortality” and “Bird Management as an Add-on Service,” so I’m glad the pest technicians are hip to ancillary services.

There also is indeed a session on social media — how to build a Facebook fan page and how to link it to your Twitter account — but I couldn’t figure out if it is geared toward pest-control companies or hotels, cruise lines and apartment complexes.

That’s because people from the National Pest Management Association didn’t have time to answer my questions today in the run-up to the conference.

I guess they know how to stay out of the travel media.

UPDATE: I just spoke with Missy Henriksen, vice president of public affairs, for NPMA. She says about 60 people from government agencies, the lodging industry, apartment rental industry and colleges are expected to attend the Bed Bug Symposium.

Her description of bed bugs as “hitch-hikers” would give any seasoned traveler pause as she notes that bed bugs that make it from a hotel room into your suitcase may crawl into other travelers’ suitcases in airliner cargo holds.

Henriksen ties the bed bug “epidemic” to increased international travel over the years and notes that bed bugs are equal opportunity inhabitants. That is, their presence doesn’t necessarily indicate a hygience problem and their infestation can happen to hostels and five-star properties alike.

Here are some of Henriksen’s tips for travelers:

• Keep your suitcase in the hotel-room bathroom on the tiled floor because bed-bug eggs are sticky and are less likely to be present on the bathroom floor, where they can be more easily spotted anyway.
• Take all of your clothes out of the suitcase and hang them up in the closet or put them in drawers.
• Inspect the hotel-room bed for small specs of blood — bed bugs feed on humans and one feeding can last for a year — and the bed bugs themselves by inspecting sheets and the bed’s skirting.
• When you return home, wash all of your clothes in hot water or take them to the drycleaner and vacuum your suitcase.

Henriksen’s urges hotels to tackle any bed-bug infestations immediately and to contact pest professionals.

And, she defends lodging companies trying to keep a bed-bug problem out of the media.

“If there is a broken water pipe, hotels don’t alert the media,” Henriksen says. “The same is true with bed bugs.”

Figures released by hotel management software firm RateTiger paint an intriguing picture of the continual climb in online activity by hotels.

While some might assume online bookings for hotels, for example, had reached a peak of sorts in recent years and the number of customers trying web booking for the first time was slowing, but data released for the past three years may suggest otherwise.

In addition, hotels appear to be using more sites to distribute products and therefore are calling on the RateTiger system more often to make updates for particular channels.

RateTiger says “online activity” – including room and other inventory changes – from the hotels on its system jumped by 196% between January 2009 and January 2010.

This isn’t far short of the 218% growth experienced between January 2008 and the same period in 2009.

RateTiger says the average number of sites that hotels use to distribute product (online travel agencies, metas, affiliate networks) has also increased from eight in 2008 to ten in 2010.

The increase in this area is generally taking place at the rate of one extra site a year since the monitoring of data began.

The most likely reason is due to wider choice of intermediary sites in the marketplace and the need to offload distressed stock quickly and in more channels, primarily as a result of occupancy rates declining as the economy worsened in the latter part of 2008.

The company says in January 2010 it tracked 27 million updates of online activity by hotels to its system.

Chief executive Sascha Hausmann predicts this will reach around 500 million updates over the course of the next 12 months.

TripAdvisor has come up with a clever way of slicing and dicing its content for marketing purposes by naming its Top 10 movie hotels in the U.S., and leveraging its user-generated content to do so.

No, these aren’t the properties with the most-complete roster of on-demand videos for in-room entertainment, but are hotels where some well-known movies — or at least some scenes — were filmed.

So, for example, TripAdvisor, an online travel review site owned by Expedia Inc., recommends Mountain Lake Hotel in Pembroke, Va., where “Dirty Dancing” was filmed.

“Dirty Dancing fans might just have the time of their lives at this property, which featured as the fictitious Kellerman’s Resort in the cult classic movie,” says TripAdvisor. “Nestled in the New River Valley of the Appalachian Mountains, the hotel offers stunning scenery, as well as Dirty Dancing weekends featuring karaoke, dance lessons and a film location tour.”

And, TripAdvisor,without specifying the user’s screen name [we found it] in its press release, quotes hotel reviewer wish2travelmore2 as saying: “We are not Dirty Dancing fanatics, but enjoyed seeing the locations around the property that we recognized from the movie.”

TripAdvisor says travelers recommend Mountain Lake Hotel, with its $220 average nightly rate, for families and outdoor-adventure seekers.

So, for each property named, TripAdvisor leverages its user-generated content to indicate what types of vacations the hotels are suited for and it uses travelers’ reviews for marketing purposes.

Although TripAdvisor rates Mountain Lake Hotel #1 in Pembroke, Va. (population around 1,100), it is the only hotel in the town that’s reviewed and only 55% of TripAdvisor reviewers gave it a thumbs up.

Here is TripAdvisor’s Top 10:

1. The Fairmont San Francisco, (Vertigo, Towering Inferno, Sudden Impact,
   Junior and The Rock)
2. Bellagio Las Vegas, Nevada (Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Thirteen)
3. The Plaza, New York City (North By Northwest, Crocodile Dundee,
The Way We Were, Home Alone 2 and Bride Wars)

4. Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, (Mission Impossible 3,
The Bodyguard, Spiderman, Wedding Crashers,
Dreamgirls and Pretty in Pink)

5. Beverly Wilshire Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills, Calif. (Pretty Woman,
Beverly Hills Cop I and III, and Bulworth)

6. Renaissance St. Louis Hotel Airport, Saint Louis (Up in the Air)
7. The Roosevelt Hotel, New York City (Maid in Manhattan and Wall Street)
8. Fountainebleau Miami Beach (The Bodyguard, Goldfinger, Scarface)
9. Timberline Lodge, Timberline Lodge, Oregon (The Shining)
10. Mountain Lake Hotel, Pembroke, Va. (Dirty Dancing)

You’d never say accuse Priceline President and CEO Jeffery Boyd of waxing nostalgic about metasearch because, as the head of an online travel agency, he has been a metasearch critic since its earliest days.

Still, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference 2010 in San Francisco today, Boyd says metasearch’s best days are behind it.

Metasearch

“In some ways, the market has moved to another time and place around that,” says Boyd, referring to metasearch.

The Priceline exec says the OTAs’ decision to remove booking fees on airline tickets took away much of the consumer benefit in using metasearch, with its heavy reliance on air, since there now is wide pricing parity on airline tickets across channels.

Looking back on the short history of metasearch, Boyd says what happened to the sector is that one player — Kayak — “has grown very substantially” while the others haven’t.

Still, he notes that Priceline views metasearch players as advertising partners for airline tickets, although hotels are a much larger focus of Priceline’s business.

Private Sales

On other issues, Boyd says he views private sales, as practiced by Jetsetter, Kayak and Travelzoo as “niche businesses,” which will remain very small compared with the online travel agencies.

Boyd says it’s “hard to see how they will scale” when they offer limited-time sales for a limited number of properties.

He adds that hotels won’t “dedicate material amounts of inventory” to private sales and thus a consumer would have a “fractional” chance to find a San Francisco hotel deal on Jetsetter for the dates the consumer desires.

Boyd doesn’t see Priceline offering private sales and adds that the company already addresses that market through Name-Your-Own Price.

No Opaque for UK

Boyd doesn’t envision Priceline trying to resurrect a Name-Your-Own Price offering in the U.K. because mounting such an effort would be very difficult and he doesn’t want to get distracted from the company’s primary focus in Europe, building Booking.com.

Priceline tried to launch an opaque offering in the U.K. several years ago and it “wasn’t very successful” because hotel inventory in Europe is fragmented and the star-ratings systems are inconsistent, he says.

“I think it is a more difficult proposition there [Europe],” Boyd adds.

Hotel-only in Europe gives Expedia, lastminute.com an Advantage

With Priceline’s focus on hotel-only Booking.com in Europe, Expedia and lastminute.com get an advantage because they offer vacation packages, Boyd says.

That means Priceline won’t be able to attract certain travelers who prefer to shop for packages.

Still, Boyd says Priceline is not working on a vacation-package business for Europe.

Also, in the advantages-disadvantages sphere, Boyd acknowledges that Expedia has a better ability to merchandise promotions than Priceline has as Expedia got into the merchandising-promotions game earlier than Priceline did.

Dual Strategy for Asia

Boyd likes Priceline’s strategy of seeking to gain traction in Asia markets by entering the region with its two subsidiaries, Booking.com and Agoda.

Boyd says hoteliers in Asia can control their own pricing through Booking.com, which uses a retail/agency model.

Meanwhile, he says, Agoda uses the merchant model and can drive demand to the hotel from within Asia, while Booking.com can spur international demand.

Thus, Priceline has a dual strategy for the Asia hotel duel and Boyd likes that just fine.

Surprising news for the digerati from a large survey by budget accommodation provider Hostelworld indicating that Facebook and YouTube lead the way in use of social media by travellers at the expense of Twitter.

The poll of 2,000 regular hostel users found that only 9% used the Twitter micro-blogging platform, while almost half used Facebook  and nearly a third were users of video sharing service YouTube.

1. 47% – Facebook
2. 31% – YouTube
3. 9% – Twitter
4. 6% – Flickr
5. 6% – MySpace
6. 1% – Bebo

The results, presented at Hostelworld’s annual customer conference in Dublin, Ireland, also revealed how travellers are booking their accommodation online.

Home desktop computers secured 34% of the vote, behind laptops at 46% but way ahead of smartphones with just 5%.

Although 87% of respondents claimed they would take take a mobile device with them when travelling, almost half said it was for SMS messaging (46%) and calls (41%). Only 13% pinpointed web browsing as an activity they would use their phones for.

Other areas covered the survey included booking windows for travellers, with the strong majority buying accommodation within a month of their arrival time.

• 13% – 3 months or more
• 41% – 1 month
• 27% – 1 week
• 12% – 3-4 days
• 7% – 1-2 days

The travellers represented 70 countries around the world (Australia – 9%, USA – 8%, Britain and Canada – 7%) and 42% were aged 25-34 and 36% were 18-24.

The Expedia-TechCrunch squabble over a missing faxed-hotel confirmation points to a little-known fact: Faxes may be dying in the hotel industry, but they still have plenty of life and play an ongoing role.

Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz Worldwide and Priceline’s Booking.com, to name a few travel sellers, all still fax booking confirmations in some instances.

Take a look at this Hotel Partners FAQ on Booking.com.

It reads, in part:

Q: How do we receive the confirmation for a reservation?

A: You will receive the confirmation by fax. (After a booking is made online).

Over at Orbitz Worldwide, spokesman Brian Hoyt says a minority of hotels use an extranet for its merchant-hotel program, and about 5% of this minority choose to receive their booking confirmations from Orbitz via fax.

And, where is it most common?

Shockingly, Hoyt says the use of faxes by hoteliers in the Orbitz merchant program is most prevalent in the U.S., then Europe, “and then it falls off.”

He points out that in some rural areas hoteliers may still be using dial-up, and sometimes prefer faxes over e-mail.

For hotels that choose to receive the confirmations from Orbitz via fax, the process occurs like this:

1. The hotel provides inventory via the extranet.

2. The consumer books the hotel online or over the phone.

3. Orbitz faxes the hotel a booking confirmation and recieves a confirmation that the fax went through.

4. The hotel closes out the inventory on the extranet.

Hoyt says the process works well, although occasionally there can be problems with over-bookings at major events such as the Super Bowl, a presidential Inauguration or the Olympics if hotels don’t close out inventory after receiving the faxed confirmations.

At Travelocity, spokesman Joel Frey says a “small” percentage of hoteliers in its merchant-hotel program choose to receive confirmations via fax.

“We instituted a behind-the-scenes program several years ago where our customer service team calls on properties receiving fax confirmations to ensure that Travelocity bookings are confirmed,” Frey says. “It has been successful for us.”

Expedia, too, with all its direct-connect programs for large and midsize chains, confirms that it faxes confirmations to some hotels.

The reduction in the use of faxes in the travel industry over the last decade caused the American Society of Travel Agents to cease tracking the use of faxes by travel agents as a separate category in its annual Supplier-Travel Agent Relationship Reports, but Research Director Melissa Teates believes the use of faxes for bookings may fall within the “Other” category in the following chart:

So, it’s clear, the use of faxes may have diminished from their heyday, but they indeed live on.

Which means, when you book a hotel online or offline, follow the advice of Darren Cronian of Travel Rants: Always call the hotel to confirm your reservation.

Australia-New Zealand online accommodation service Wotif is aiming to unsettle some of the biggest players in the region’s flight search and booking sector with the launch of WotFlight.

The new service launched today and is initially targeting domestic flights in and around Australia, with plans to expand into regional and long-haul flights over time.

Another flight search and booking system wouldn’t ordinarily capture huge amounts of attention, but the pedigree and experience behind the Wotif mothership is likely to make its new rivals in the airfare area take note.

Wotif.com launched in 2000 as an online distressed hotel inventory service, but quickly extended its booking time and global reach to challenge some of the biggest names in the Australasian region.

It is now one very few businesses to dominate a market instead of Expedia-owned TripAdvisor in accommodation rankings on Hitwise, courtesy of its running start and strong brand in Australia.

Wotif is currently almost 2% ahead of TripAdvisor in market share and 4% and 5% ahead of Booking.com and HotelClub respectively.

The new WotFlight brand is being touted as a “natural progression” for the wider group by its CEO Robbie Cookie.

Inevitably the two brands will work closely alongside each other as visitors to the new site will be offered accommodation vouchers on the sister site.

The fighting talk has already started, with brand manager Megan Magill claiming supremacy over content and functionality against its new rival in the flight search sector before the site even launches.

Webjet, Flight Centre and the Australian divisions of Expedia and lastminute.com currently top the Hitwise rankings in the agency categories.

Seeking to increase its hotel and vacation package distribution, Orbitz introduced a travel agent website which enables travel professionals globally to earn commission and tack on their own service fees and markups.

The standard commisson is 10% for hotels and 4% for vacation packages.

Although Orbitz did not highlight it in its announcement, Orbitz for Agents also pays a $5 flat fee on air bookings and 60% net revenue on travel insurance booked in tandem with vacation packages.

Orbitz spokesman Brian Hoyt says this agent-specific functionality, which uses the Neat Group platform as a foundation, goes well beyond the Orbitz affiliate program, which basically is a revenue-share plan. Here are details on the existing affiliate program and its fee structure.

The travel agency program is part of Orbitz Worldwide’s strategy to make up for some lost time regarding areas — distribution, its hotel business in Asia, its private label business — which may have received inadequate attention in years’ past.

With Orbitz for Agents travel agents can earn commissions, retain the primary relationship with their clients and have access to Orbitz Worldwide’s global hotel inventory as they customize vacation packages,” Hoyt says. Orbitz is the merchant of record and service fees are itemized separately.

Orbitz is running a promotion where the first 500 travel agents to sign up and make a booking by March 15 would earn 12% commission on hotels and 5% on packages through March 31, 2011.

The agent website also features “real-time revenue and sales reporting,” Orbitz says.

Commission payments are mailed monthly for travel “consumed” in the prior month, Orbitz says.

Here’s a FAQ on the fine print.

The Orbitz program is open to travel agents globally.

A pundit has the right to cast a critical eye over a business, even if the founders are proven entrepreneurial billionaires.

Robert Diener of Getaroom.com should need no introduction to readers of a blog about the online travel industry.

In 2002, the parts of Hotel Reservation Network/Hotels.com that IAC did not already own were bought and merged with Expedia.

The deal set Diener and his partners up for life and made Expedia the then biggest force in online hotels in the world.

A title – despite the challenges of Booking.com/Priceline, Orbitz and Travelocity – they still hold.

In July 2009 (was there a seven-year non-compete?), Diener announced the launch of Getaroom.com (a pre-Tnooz Dennis Schaal said this about the announcement).

Given the pedigree it was inevitable they would receive a lot of media attention.

On PhoCusWright’s Center Stage in Orlando, Diener was interviewed by Carol Rheem of PCW giving the blog and tweetpit a chance to discuss and critique the GetARoom model.

The business is a twist on opaque pricing and a reversal of the Priceline and Hotwire models.

A consumer looks up a hotel on the getaroom website where prices are clearly displayed.

Then the consumer calls the GetARoom call centre to purchase the room. GetARoom will sell the customer the room over the phone at a price less than the one displayed on the site but will not tell the consumer what the price is (and therefore what the discount is) until after the customer’s card has been charged.

With Hotwire and Priceline you don’t know the hotel’s identity until after your card has been charged. With GetARoom you know the hotel at the time the card is charged but not the price.

For this to work three things have to happen: consumers have to pick up the phone; consumers have to be prepared to give their credit card even though the final price is not known; and hotels have to be prepared to give opaque cheaper rates based on a phone call as a gate.

Let me take you through each of these and tell you why these three elements will happen at a scale insufficient to make this work:

1. Consumers have to pick up the phone: consumers have abandoned the phone for simple transactions such as hotel bookings and point to point air. Especially in the US. It is instant gratification, no-talk booking that is and has driven the online revolution. Driving people back to the phone for a straight out hotel booking seems counter to the rest of the online travel revolution.
2. Consumers have to agree to charges without knowing price: the obvious analysis here is that consumers are going to be reluctant to do anything when price and potentially room type is unknown. Arguing against myself, I could say that credit card hesitation was the largest anti-online travel argument back in the old days and the industry and consumer found a way around that. But in this case it is more than just typical security related consumer CC hesitation. Getaroom is asking consumers to gamble with price. Consumers need significant rewards – beyond the odds rewards – to gamble on price. The less obvious analysis is around credit card charging rules and chargebacks. A chargeback is where a consumer denies a charge levied against their card. The online travel industry has to deal with the challenge of consumers denying charges for transactions without signatures or PIN/code based confirmation. Mastercard Chargeback reason code number 4808 states that a charge can be challenged if…”the transaction was non–face-to-face and was not authorized.”. (manual here).  I can imagine an easy path for a potential customer successfully securing a chargeback by saying “they did not tell me the price. I did not know what the charge was going to be”.
3. Hotels have to be prepared to give opaque cheaper rates based on a phone call as a gate: hotels give deep discounts when they can protect the rates for unfettered booking and thus threatening regular rates. Scores of examples of this – package rates, secret hotels, closed user groups like travel clubs or loyalty groups, group rates and more. Critical to the hotels giving the discounts is a comfort level that the discounted rates are sufficiently hidden from general public access to protect the standard rates. Having to make a phone call does not seem to be a sufficient gate or level of protection to encourage a scale number of hotels to offer discounts. This is especially true for chain hotels. Chains are the number one participators in closed groups precisely because they can product their other pricing channels. If I am right here then either GetARoom ends up with only a limited number of hotels offering discounts or they have to provide discounts by cutting their margins. The first (limited number of hotels) is a bad customer experience. The second (cutting margin) risks hotel anger for breaking Best Rate Guarantee requirement and limiting scope for marketing and technology investment.

But – while there are three reasons why I don’t think Getaroom will work – there is one big reason why it will work.

Last time Diener and team tried to facilitate hotel bookings, they built a company and they sold it for billions.

Appendage:

I need to clarify my comments in point 2 above. The first time I called the getaroom call centre and tried to book a hotel with an unpublished rate I thought that I had to make my credit card available to be charged before knowing the price.  After this post went live a comment was sent to me that said that it  was possible to pull out of the transaction after the price was disclosed and before the card had been changed.  So I called the getaroom call centre again.  In that subsequent call to getaroom it was true that I was able to pull out of the transaction after being told the price.  But it is not a simple “they tell you the price and I say yes or no” sale.   The call centre agent said she would only tell me the unpublished rate (assuming their was one) if she thought I was ‘willing to do the transaction’.  This means she would asses my willingness to transact, take my cc and reservation details, tell me the price and (once I confirm) charge the card.  She made it clear that while I could pull out once she told me the unpublished rate, that she would only tell me the unpublished rate if she was satisfied that I was “willing to complete the transaction”. She would not be any clearer on how to she assessed this willingness – though it became clear that by asking so many questions on whether or not I could pull out that she was putting me in the unwilling basket.

Disclosure: See Hughes’s Tnooz profile – contributor in a personal capacity, views are not representative of Orbitz Worldwide.

In what looks like a shake-up at HotelClub, Orbitz Worldwide’s point man in taking on Priceline and Expedia in the Asia-Pacific region, OWW brought in a new president of HotelClub.

Jeremy Bellinghausen, most previously vice president of advertiser products with R.H. Donnelley, becomes HotelClub president, replacing Chloe Lim, “who is leaving HotelClub to pursue other opportunities,” OWW says.

Bellinghausen, who’s said to have earned his stripes in SEO, paid search and web site performance, leads HotelClub as it throws resources into furthering the adoption of its SmartRetail commission-based model and takes on Priceline’s Booking.com and Agoda, as well as Expedia’s Venere, in Asia-Pacific.

The SmartRetail proposition is a modified-retail model, and here’s some more information about it.

Orbtiz refers to HotelClub as the bedrock of its global hotel distribution platform.

Private sales on password-protected Web pages are all the rage in the travel industry these days with companies like Jetsetter and Kayak getting into the game, but Rue La La comes at it from a slightly different angle, offering stays at four-star hotels along with Gucci watches, Armani sunglasses, Stuart Weitzman sandals and Vix halter dresses.

Rue La La, newly part of public company GSI Commerce, began offering themed, 48-hour hotel sales last summer, and recently brought in travel industy veteran Marka Jenkins Waechter, formerly CEO of Metropolitan Travel, as general manager of Rue La La’s Experiences (hotels, cooking classes etc.) division. (Expedia acquired Metropolitan Travel in 2002.)

Like Jetsetter, but unlike Kayak, Rue La La serves as the merchant of record in hotel sales and a 5-member team sources merchant-model hotel deals from upscale properties.

Rue La La, headquartered in Boston, has about 200 employees and claims to have some 1.2 million members, about 75% of whom are women.

Here’s a peak from within the walled garden — you can’t use Google, Bing, Kayak or Mobissimo to access the private sales — of Rue La La’s “Luxury Under the Sun” sale for Destination Hotels and Resorts’ Miramonte Resort & Spa in Palm Springs, Calif.

Jenkins Waechter claims Rue La La approaches hotel private sales a bit differently than Kayak, for instance, in that Rue La La’s core competency is merchandising and not in great search technology.

Unlike online travel agencies, Rue La La markets hotels under themes rather than commoditizing travel inventory, Jenkins Waechter says, and the beginning of the experience, too, is different because Rue La La users may have come to the website initially to buy a bikini or some flips.

There’s an irony too in the value proposition that Rue La La presents to hotels. It uses the private sales approach so it can “discretely” move inventory, Jenkins Waechter says, yet Rue La La sees itself as being a marketing partner for hotels as it’s “telling a brand story.”

Jenkins Waechter says Rue La La plans on devoting considerable resources to travel offerings and is flexible enough to experiment with new models.

For example, she says, Rue La La may try a commission-based model for “supported sales,” where users would be able to talk to experts about the property or destination before the purchase.

The company’s private sales have not been limited to hotels. In addition to offering activities — or “experiences” in Rue La La lingo — for things like the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, Rue La La recently ran a private sale for Windstar Cruises.

Google Maps broadened its features with the introduction of “Nearby places you might like,” solidifying its role as a vehicle to plan your hotel stay, dining experience or activity.

No, Google Maps isn’t necessarily a hotels.com, TripAdvisor or a Zagat killer, but it sure is becoming a nifty place to begin trip-planning, with its plethora of user reviews, photos, videos and basic information about hotels, restaraurants and activities — and now alternative venues in the area.

So, if you search for the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square on Google Maps, you’ll find that Google has aggregated information about almost everything you might want to know about the property. If you scroll down the page past the basic property information, the photos, videos, map and user reviews, you’ll find “Nearby places you might like” and it looks like the following:

Nearby Places isn’t flashy and it is flawed, but it does provides a handy way — with links, star rating and user reviews — to search for other area hotels.

You’ll notice that although the New York Marriott Marquis is a four-star property in the very touristy Times Square, Nearby Places provides links to the 2 1/2-star Pennsylvania Hotel, as well as to Hotel Gansevoort, which isn’t exactly nearby or similar with its location  almost two miles away in the meat-packing district.

Google says of Nearby Places: “You’ll notice that we do not limit these suggestions to places sharing any specific characteristic; instead, we use a broad set of signals to come up with what are hopefully the most interesting suggestions. We’re still working on refining these signals, so bear with us if your serendipitous discovery of a new place is even more unexpected than you’d anticipated.”

Thus, some further refining may be in order if Google’s goal is to eventually furnish similar, nearby places.

You can use the new Google Maps feature to search for nearby restaurants and activities, as well.

For example, if you are looking for an activity to replace — or to supplement — your visit to NorthStar Trekking in Juneau, Alaska, Nearby Places points you to the following venues to consider.

Thus, Google Maps is continuing its evolution into an online destination guide.

The only thing missing is an integrated booking engine.