The Battle of Hotel Accommodation Booking Technologies: Challenges of OTA’s Versus Direct Bookings Systems—A Manager’s Perspective

The growth of Internet technology has seen guests increasingly using Online Travel Agents (OTA) to book accommodation. These bookings come with a high cost of acquisition to hotels, especially smaller establishments. Therefore, it is the onus of the hotels to encourage guests to book directly with their establishments to minimise the third-party cost. However, some challenges hinder the aforementioned. This chapter aims to report on the challenges hotels face in the Cape Town Metropole in attempting to win back direct booking from guests. A cross-sectional design using a quantitative approach was applied whereby an online questionnaire was used to collect data. Non-probability-purposive sampling technique was used to select hotel managers from 38 four- and five-star hotels. All ethical considerations were adhered to during this study. The findings of this study indicate that although hotel managers strive to increase direct bookings, most reservations come from external third-party sources. This can be due to not knowing the costs to acquire direct bookings, hotel websites being managed externally, and OTA’s offerings and benefits. Several aspects challenge hotel management to receive direct bookings, and this needs to be addressed to ensure hotels’ competitiveness with other counterparts.