TOURISM & TOUR OPERATORS..

Collaborating with tour operators is often seen as essential in the tourism industry. Hotels gain steady occupancy and financial security, while travelers enjoy convenience and reliability. Click here for more

However, this reliance comes with risks, such as a lack of control over marketing and potential manipulation by tour operators. These operators may redirect clients to competitors or impose fees under the guise of marketing.

The system is opaque, fostering concerns of unfair practices. Transparency could benefit hoteliers, yet both tour operators and hotels resist changes to the current system.

Actually, until today, the answer is: YES.

When you sign a contract with a Tour Operator for a tourism market (example, the German Tourism market with XYZ TRAVEL from Germany), you become dependent on XYZ TRAVEL for the German tourism market.

If XYZ TRAVEL brings a lot of tourists, things are ok, but when they don't, then you have almost nothing to do.

It's rare that the client finds his own way to come on his own for a holiday abroad. Finding a flight, then organizing a transfer from/to the airport to the hotel, taking the risk of "what if the hotel says there is no room available or not ready" when we arrive, etc.

Who to complaint? Especially when you are a bit old or with your family.

Instead, you buy your holiday from XYZ TRAVEL in your country before you leave, leave every negative possibility behind you, and say, "If something goes wrong, I have XYZ Travel to sue".

Flight, transfer, guiding, and everything is included. If there is no room, then they have alternatives. If something goes wrong during your holiday, they have a team in the field to help. If you still have any complaints, you may sue in court when you are back, etc.

So, for clients going on holiday with tour operators, there are enormous advantages. The system will likely go the same way for a long time to come.
 
For Hotels, there are enormous advantages too. Clients are usually coming for one or two weeks. When some checks out, the new ones come on the same day to replace the outgoing ones. So your hotel is constantly full. Your money is relatively secure, etc.

The risks involved for hotels in working with tour operators.

At the beginning and at the end of tourism seasons, XYZ Travel may bring clients to a neighboring hotel but not to you. In most cases, it is hard to believe this development ıs natural. Although your hotel has nearly everything better.

Usually, there are reasons that you can not prove, and in most cases, you are not even aware of them. Your neighbor has decreased the contract price, and VYZ Travel is bringing its business there because it has become more profitable now. Even in some cases, XYZ Travel may create enormous untrue stories that have never existed.

The biggest problem for hoteliers working with Tour Operators is that you can't intervene in your hotel's marketing at all. Simply, clients come or don`t. You have nothing to do except wait and pray for them to come.

Normally, XYZ TRAVEL collects clients via their booking agent network in the country where you signed the contract. And XYZ TRAVEL will NEVER allow you to contact its booking agent network directly.

They make every decision about your hotel by themselves, and you never know what the decision is.

There is always a risk of them saying "the hotel is fully booked, there is no place available" to a client who wishes to come to your hotel and redirect them to another hotel, and you will never know these kinds of developments. Neither the booking agent nor the client can check whether the hotel is full or not.

Most of the time, they demand a few thousand euros from hotels for so-called marketing. If you don't pay, they will most probably mark your hotel fully booked for times when you really need clients and redirect your clients to your neighbors. And at the times when you don't need clients from the tour operator, they will force you to accept more and more to prevent you from earning money from individuals (clients coming individually are usually staying at a higher price).
 
If the booking agents would have a n option to contact the hotel and ask if they have a room available or not, that would be more transparent for hoteliers. The hotelier would feel more confident.

But currently, the tour operator's working system is very closed to outsiders. It is open to any conspiracy theory.

Even though the tour operators' working system provides enormous positive advantages, there are also countless suspicious points in their working system.

The funniest thing is that nobody dares to touch those suspicious points at all, despite the fact that many people know that they are true. Even governments.

Is there any way to make the system more transparent?

Tour Operators are very resistant to such changes to make their working system transparent. And this can be well understood from their perspectıve. Eventually, Tour Operators' main asset is "the very closed way of work in a field that everybody wants their product", the client.

Tour Operators don't want hotels to know how they bring clients. They don't want hotels to find clients for themselves, which, in this case, results in the tour operators' position being downgraded to "a transportation company only".

But the hard part to understand is that both hotels and hotel associations are also resistant to these kinds of changes to move to a more transparent direction that eventually will be profitable for hoteliers.