Evaluation of best price clauses in hotel booking

Matthias Hunold, Reinhold Kesler, Ulrich Laitenberger and Frank Schlütter

No 16-066, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We analyze the best price clauses (BPCs) of online travel agents (OTAs) using meta-search price data of more than 45,000 hotels in different countries. Although OTAs apparently have not changed their standard commission rates following the partial ban of BPCs in Europe, we find that BPCs do influence the pricing and availability of hotel rooms across online sales channels. In particular, the abolition of Booking.com's narrow BPC is associated with the hotels' direct channel being the price leader more often. Moreover, hotels make rooms more often available at Booking.com when it does not use the narrow BPC.

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, Revised 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-ind and nep-mkt
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/173094/1/1011068435.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zewdip:16066

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().