FastBooking.com, a company which offers e-commerce tools for independent hotels, is set to launch its presence in the Middle East, starting with Dubai, UAE.
Jean-Luc Chretien, CEO of FastBooking, told Hotelier that the website, which launched in 2000 but was taken over by AccorHotels in 2015, is now present in Italy, Spain, France, England, Germany, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore.
“We will start in Dubai, and we have signed 1,300 hotels across the world within six months," he revealed.
The French company helps independent hoteliers sell themselves better on the web. Chretien said: “We provide hoteliers with booking engine solutions, channel management solutions, we help them design their websites or do their marketing online.”
Saying it was important to have a strong direct booking platform in the face of OTAs, Chretien added: “There is one things that hoteliers lack versus Booking and Expedia, which is the number of destinations and the number of hotels. Selling online is like stores. The more products your store has, the more chances that you will attract people. Guests will go to Expedia or Booking because there are so many hotels to choose.”
When an independent hotel signs up to FastBooking, it will be listed as a partner on AccorHotels.com when a guest is browsing for hotels in a destination where it is located.
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“We want to do two things, we want to look for people who want Accor properties, and for people to stay with us even if we don’t have a hotel in a certain location,” explained Chretien.
The target is to move from 4,400 properties to 10,000 hotels in two years, he revealed. “We don’t want to compete with Booking and Expedia, but we want our platform to be the strongest platform managed by a hotelier,” Chretien added.
FastBooking only partners with independent or local hotels in destinations where there is a high demand for rooms, and Chretien said one of the incentives for these brands is lower fees, access to loyalty programmes and data capture.
“We take 14% or 12% if they are a FastBooking customer. The contract is very simple. We ask them to provide content or rates, there is no obligation on rate parity or availability parity. We ask them only to have a rate competitive with OTAs.
“We communicate all the information about customers, not hide email addresses of customers. For an extra fee, they can access our loyalty programme.”
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