Evaluation of best price clauses in online hotel booking

Matthias Hunold, Reinhold Kesler, Ulrich Laitenberger and Frank Schlütter

No 278, DICE Discussion Papers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)

Abstract: We analyze the best price clauses (BPCs) of online travel agents (OTAs) using meta-search price data of nearly 30,000 hotels in different countries. We find that BPCs influence the pricing and availability of hotel rooms across online sales channels. In particular, hotels publish their offers more often at Booking.com when it does not use the narrow BPC, and also tend to promote the direct online channel more actively. Moreover, the abolition of Booking.com's narrow BPC is associated with the direct channel of chain hotels having the strictly lowest price more often.

Keywords: best price clauses; hotel booking; MFN; OTA; vertical restraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D40 L42 L81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ict, nep-mkt and nep-pay
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/172539/1/1010336738.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Evaluation of best price clauses in online hotel bookings (2018)
Working Paper: Evaluation of best price clauses in online hotel bookings (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:dicedp:278

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DICE Discussion Papers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().