Forum Moderators: skibum
Initially, I tolerated this since I was a newbie to online travel industry and assumed it would be a norm.
Why not WW members form an industry association to prevent affiliates being treated this way?
No way will the hotel pay a commission to the affiliate program until the guest has been and paid. The guest has the right to cancel up to a defined number of hours before booked arrival, so will not necessarily actually arrive at the hotel. This is quite a high number who cancel
After that not all hotels pay the commissions due to the affiliate program. You can do a SE search to find the industry figure for non-payment of commissions, its quite high. I get a weekly list of hotels to remove from my web sites, from my affiliate program, and these are the non-payers in many instances.
So at the end of the day you can, and will, only get paid for money that you have actually generated in the coffers of the affiliate program.
I understand cancellation rate is high. The problem is that even after 6 or 8 months after the check-in date, affiliate stats *DONT* indicate whether booking has been cancelled or NOT and the payment also remains uncollected.
> No way will the hotel pay a commission to the affiliate program until
> the guest has been and paid. The guest has the right to cancel up to a
> defined number of hours before booked arrival, so will not necessarily
> actually arrive at the hotel. This is quite a high number who cancel
>
Your affiliate program, if it's good, should provide some sort of "confidence" score based on the payment history of each hotel.
There are 2 main payment models in the hotel industry: commissions and pre-payment. With commissions, the guest pays the hotel, the travel agency or reservations company periodically (usually monthly) bills the hotel for commissions, the hotel pays the agency for the reservations that actually showed up. Some delay payments for several months until they are satisfied the guest isn't going to issue a chargeback. Other times, the guest is actively disputing the bill, so the hotel doesn't get payment for months (or ever). Very basic idea: until/unless the hotel gets paid, the agency doesn't get a commission, and the affiliate doesn't get his/her cut.
For pre-payment, the agency collects the money from the customer then pays the hotel. In these cases, the agency usually pays the their affiliates for these reservations at the end of the month the guest checks in.
In addition to this, of course, are instances of fraud by the hotel (the guest checks in, but the hotel says he's a no-show to avoid paying the commission).
Direct contracts with hotels is a good idea. But I think I need to do more traffic-building exercise for 2007 before entering direct contracts.
I hope affiliates form a stronger network to raise their concerns to travel associations like IATA so that hotels don't cheat or delay payment.
[webmasterworld.com...]
This thread had a discussion on the somewhat opaque structure of HotelClub's program for affiliates.
I removed most of the booking links to hotelclub because they put distracting banners. I just logged in to find $46 as balance(may be due to residual links). Otherwise, Hotelclub has a nice interface.
Whereas, issues with allrez are payment schedule and mediocre booking interface.
Still hunting for a good, reliable hotel affiliate program with XML interface and datafeeds....
My other complaint is that they seem to make tweaks to their XML every few months. Some are enhancements, but some are you-must-upgrade-this-feature "enhancements." Very annoying as I don't like having to go back and tweak then retest my code every few months. I'll tweak and recheck my code due to MY enhancements and on MY time schedule, thank you very much!
Maybe, I should try again since LifeInAsia is getting replies from the support team.
It beats me why these organisations cannot either reply or tell you by canned reply that they are too busy. If it is a void, I am afraid I loose patience.
