To cater even more strongly for the growing customer demand for individuality, combinability and late booking, TUI has developed a new…
To cater even more strongly for the growing customer demand for individuality, combinability and late booking, TUI has developed a new bookings site in the internet. The TUI Hotel Portal. Right in time for ITB in Berlin, the new website was opened for business by the head of TUI, Dr. Michael Frenzel. The portal is aimed at individual travellers familiar with the internet who are looking to book simple standard products. At www.tui-hotels.com, the Group now provides several thousand beach, city and classic holiday hotels for people making their own travel arrangements. The comprehensive range of hotels is also integrated within the existing websites and can be combined for instance with Hapag-Lloyd Express flights. The hotels can be booked at attractive conditions in only a few steps.
The Hotel Portal is a market place for customers who wish to book flexibly, and hoteliers who wish to manage flexibly. We provide hoteliers with a dynamic tool with which to manage their products in line with the market situation, explained Michael Ohm, TUI interactive managing director. City hotels in particular are finding it difficult to release longterm plannable block bookings. The secret of success here is variable pricing. The situation for typical beach hotels is different because TUI continues to enjoy very favourable buying conditions which it can pass on for the benefit of the customers. There are also benefits for travel agencies as well: unlike the usual holiday portals, TUI also makes these products available to travel agencies. They not only have their own access, they also receive a commission of eight to 12 per cent on each booking.
TUI intends to expand the spectrum in the TUI Hotel Portal to around 5000 hotels by the end of the year. The website will also be available shortly in other languages and other countries. The products will differ according to country.
The hotels in TUI`s own catalogues will be marked to improve user orientation. TUI hotels will have a yellow background and will be marked with the TUI quality symbol. If TUI Deutschland is the provider, the price will be the same as in the TUI catalogues. If the hotel itself is the provider, the prices can be variable and are set by the hotels themselves. This means that the indicated hotel rate is exclusively available in the internet and reflects the hotel occupancy rate. Hotels without a coloured background and with no special marking are exclusively offered in the Hotel Portal and are not part of the TUI catalogue range.
Internet travel market
The European market for holidays booked in the internet is growing continuously. We forecast that around ten per cent of all travel expenditure (business and holiday travel) in Europe will be generated via the internet by 2005. Europe`s leading tourism group TUI is already one of the largest online holiday companies in Europe with around 50 holiday websites. We recognised the increasing importance of the internet early on and developed and implemented a wide-ranging online strategy, explained Dr. Michael Frenzel at the press conference in Berlin. The online turnover of World of TUI has increased by a factor of 10 in the last three years to Euro 726 million.
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