Booking.com takes over hotel bookings on New York tourism website

Powered by Booking.com

The arch nemesis of Expedia is making new friends in the USA, and one of them happens to be none other than New York City.  Booking.com has kicked off an affiliate partnership deal with nycgo.com, the city's official tourism website, to power hotel bookings in New York.

American OTAs must be feeling the sting as the Amsterdam based Booking.com increasingly stomps deeper into American home turf.  Priceline group is already on top of the leader boards in Asia and Europe, according to PhoCusWright.

It appears the NYC site was previously powered by Travelocity, and I suspect that part of the decision to switch to Booking.com was the number of localized sites it has around the world.  Currently Booking.com supports over 40 languages.  This potentially allows NYC to tap into large international markets that are more likely to visit the tourism site compared to domestic travelers already familiar with NYC.

New York is one of the most popular tourism destinations in the United States, and this new partnership may be the tipping point for additional American tourism organizations to partner with Booking.com and appeal to a more international audience.  A quick search also shows San Francisco's tourism site being powered by Booking.com.

From a supply perspective, Booking.com offers 573 properties while Expedia and Orbitz have 508 and 447 properties respectively.

Hotel Quickly's last minute mobile rates not so exclusive

Hotel Quickly is the Hotel Tonight ripoff here in Asia.  Both have super sexy UX and pride themselves on fantastic deals at the last minute.  Every day at 12 noon local time, Hotel Quickly pushes out several hotel deals in key Asian destinations.  If you read the mobile FAQ on how it works, Hotel Quickly claims that its deals are exclusive to their app users.  I decided to put their claim to the test today.

For a one night stay arriving in Singapore tonight, Hotel Quickly offered six hotels.  Two were called 'prime', two were labeled as 'design', and the last two were classified as 'comfy'.  I decided to compare the rates and availability of these six hotels across some other popular mobile booking sites in Asia . . . specifically Agoda, Booking, and Expedia.

Here are the takeaways.  Keep in mind I compared all rates inclusive of taxes and service charges, the "all in" price.

1) Hotel Quickly (green bar in graph below) fell short of defending their value proposition, at least for today.  Their app didn't offer even one hotel that had rates lower than any other OTA's mobile app.  Even the featured hotel they recommended, identified by shaking the phone, was only on par with Agoda and Booking's rates.

2) Expedia (yellow bar in graph below) lost out in some way with four of these six hotels.  They didn't have availability or relationships with Hotel Royal at Queens or Grand Park Orchard, so these weren't bookable at all.  They did show availability at Amara and Ramada, but their rates were $30-40 SGD more than their competitors.  Yes, I made sure I compared the same room types.

Hotel Quickly has come out with aggressive marketing communications to create consumer perception that their rates are exclusive over other booking channels.  They also have a very clever kickback technique, including a referral program that snags users 10 USD in credits when friends make a booking with the user's unique invite code.  Although the average last minute consumer is less likely to compare prices across multiple mobile apps, Hotel Quickly needs to up the game on their so called exclusive rates if it wants to create real and sustainable value for its app users.