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Why is a disparity showing a more expensive direct rate when my booking engine has cheaper rates?
Why is a disparity showing a more expensive direct rate when my booking engine has cheaper rates?
Holly Groom avatar
Written by Holly Groom
Updated over a week ago

Parity Monitoring is powered by searches made by guests on a hotel website. The cheapest rate from the search i.e. the direct rate is compared against the cheapest rate for each configured OTA i.e. the OTA rate. If the direct rate is higher than the OTA rate that is recorded as a disparity for that OTA.

Triptease takes into account every search made and the direct rate depends on the information displayed to the guest in that search. There are some scenarios that could result in a false disparity arising from an incorrect direct price. These include:

  • Filtering: The guest filtering the search results in such a way that the cheapest rate is no longer displayed on the page

  • Promo Codes: The search has a promo code (or package code, etc) that results in the cheaper rate not being displayed on the page

  • Inconsistent search and results: When the guest changes the search parameters i.e. search dates and/or occupancy the booking engine may update the search parameters first (1), then update the search results (2). This means there is a possibility that we scrape the page between these two events (1) and (2) resulting in old search results being logged against new search parameters.

At Triptease we have specifically engineered our scraping to eliminate false disparities arising from these scenarios. However it is not possible to eliminate them completely. For instance, in privacy modes on certain browsers it is harder to catch these false disparities.

Do these false disparity impact the customer's experience?

Since Triptease does not ever display a cheaper OTA rate on Price Check hoteliers can be assured that their potential customers will not see a more expensive direct price appear on Price Check. Moreover, Price Check would usually have already displayed before the user filtered the results.

How do I find true disparities amidst false disparities easily?

We recommend using the download feature in the Parity Monitoring dashboard and filtering the .csv file to look specifically at the Room Rate you are interested in. This will help you focus on the cases where OTAs are undercutting the rates that you had agreed they would use.

I would like Price Check and Parity Monitoring to work for certain promo codes. Is that possible?

By default, we do not use searches with promo codes for Price Check or Parity Monitoring. However, if you have promo codes that result in cheaper direct rates, please reach out to your Customer Succes Manager to get them set up as exceptions.

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