Discount Hotels
Discount hotels is a term used by web based discount hotel reservations companies to inform you that they sell the same hotel accommodations at
the same hotels for less money than you would have to pay by booking your room directly with the hotel. Actually, "discount hotels" is
a misnomer. The hotel is not discounted, the hotel room rates are discounted. The last thing hoteliers want is for their hotel to be labeled a "discounted
hotel." Stockholders frown on such negative connotations too. However, on the Internet, the phrase is commonly used by people looking for discount
hotel rooms through a search engine query. It is a convenient phrase not lost in anyone's translation. So convenient is the term that on average
1,000,000 people type in "discount hotels" on search engine queries every month.
You can appreciate, therefore, how important the phrase is to hotel reservations service companies (A.K.A. hotel wholesalers), including Southwestrooms.com,
and to have themselves positioned in search results so you can easily see their link and click on it. These technical mechanisms not only drive
the Internet, but help nurture symbiotic relationships between the hotels, the hotel reservations service companies, the search engine and the buyer.
For the last several years this symbiosis has worked quite well, but not without it bringing a huge price tag along for the ride.
The travel industry spends over ten billion dollars every year on advertising. For example, television ads have a primary and a secondary objective.
Their primary objective is to hammer away at your psyche to burn the advertiser's web site name into your brain. (Perhaps cause for nightmares!)
The secondary objective is to get you to remember their slogan, like: 'discount hotels,' or 'lowest rates guarantee,' or 'best
deals on hotels,' etc. But, those are more than mere slogans, they are Internet hotel keyword phrases.
Both the advertiser's web site name and slogan are precisely articulated many times during the ads' presentation. Regardless of content,
advertisers only want you to remember their web site name (primary objective) and type it into your URL bar as soon as possible—before you
forget. If you do forget the web site name but remember the slogan (secondary objective) and type that in on your next Internet search, it can reward
you with results that include a link to the web site who's name you (temporally) forgot. The advertiser then spends top-dollar to ensure his listing
is prominently displayed at or near the top of the page. If this reward system is starting to make you feel like a fish on a line, welcome to the
the world of hotel reservations advertising.
There is a third yet more subtle objective; to pre-establish your trust. Your trust is necessary to get you to spend your money. All hotel reservation
service providers, including yours truly, need your trust. One of the most successful trust campaigns ever invented centers around three key-words: "lowest
rate guarantee." Don't believe it. It's hype. 8,270,000 web sites cannot all offer THE lowest rate.
The opportunity to make money has certainly never been lost on the search engines, many of whom are hotel affiliates for one of the big-box hotel
reservation services. Some search engines have become hotel reservation portals themselves. The opportunity to make money has also given way to
some very innovative advertising schemes on the Internet; owned mostly by the search engines themselves, which rake in millions upon millions of
dollars every year from sponsored-links that cost the advertiser from 10 cents to several dollars per click. Travel reservations is and always has
been the most hotly contested business segment on the Internet—you can guess on which end of the cost-per-click scale advertisers are paying
for the search term "discount hotels."
If this is starting to sound like a game to you, it's because it is. No big surprise, it's what free enterprise is all about. And a very profitable
one as long as you, the consumer, stays uninformed. However, Southwestrooms.com is going to inform you, because we know that an informed consumer
will use our hotel reservations service again. What consumer, once informed, would want it any other way?
Click here for
Discount Hotels FAQ
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