In an effort to remain competitive against each other and with online travel agencies, wholesalers and packagers have been racing to enhance their price-match processes to ensure more immediate turnaround times on price-match requests.
“If we’re not competitive on price, [agents are] going to go somewhere else,” said John Caldwell, president of MLT Vacations, which last month rolled out a faster and more efficient price-matching protocol for its Delta Vacations brand to help agents secure bookings.
Delta Vacations had already offered price matching, but it was a process that required filling out a form and that could take a few days to process.
Now agents can request a price match from Delta Vacations by phone. As long as they can provide a screenshot of the competing quote, they can get the price match on the spot, according to Caldwell. They must also request the price match within 24 hours of booking.
Competing wholesaler Mark Travel has also been enhancing the price-matching system for several of its brands. Last month, Mark Travel took over the management of United Vacations from MLT and when it did, United Vacations became part of the company’s best price guarantee program.
Similar to MLT, Mark Travel says it will automatically match a competitor’s price for United Vacations provided that all the vacation components are the same. Agents need to email United Vacations the reservation number along with a screenshot of the competitor details, and matches will be approved within three business hours.
Mark Travel has been offering this option for agents that work with Funjet Vacations, another Mark Travel brand, for about the last nine months.
The screenshot method now being used by these companies not only allows for quicker fulfillment, it also gives agents the ability to capture a competing quote any time of day or night and provide evidence of it to price-match teams, which might not be able to find and confirm the same quote days, hours, or even minutes later.
Complications, commission protection
The trick with price matching is that it can be a relatively complicated process, which is part of the reason why packagers often have agents fill out a form.
Just because the client thinks he or she has found a better price through a competing tour operator, directly from a hotel or through an online agency doesn’t mean that they are actually comparing apples to apples.
With a quoted vacation package, packagers need to be able to pull apart the component pricing before they can assess the price match and ultimately grant it if it’s valid.
Wholesalers and packagers rely on teams of people who are specialized in component pricing, and in breaking it down, to decide on whether the agent has brought them a true price match.
For agents the concern is twofold. They want to keep the business, but they also want to protect their commission on that business.
According to Caldwell, MLT protects agent commissions at their regular levels if they price match with a competing tour operator; the commission will be granted on the matched price, not on the original price. If the agent found the price-match request on an OTA site, MLT will match the price and pay 10% commission on the land portion.
Similarly, at United Vacations, if the price to be matched comes from a competing tour operator the agents will earn their standard commission on the price-matched rate. If the price match request comes from a price the agent found through an OTA or hotel-direct company, agents will earn up to 10% depending on the hotel.
Funjet, for instance, has been working to integrate a larger number of hotels into its Price Match Plus program, which offers a guaranteed price match against traditional tour operators, hotel direct companies, and OTAs for hotels in its system designated as Instant OTA Price Match Plus hotels.
The majority of Funjet’s Mexico, Caribbean and Hawaii hotels are Instant OTA Price Match Plus hotels, and agents earn full commission on the revised rate on matches against traditional tour operators and hotel-direct companies, and 10% on OTA matches within this program.
Follow Michelle Baran on Twitter @mbtravelweekly.