Choice CEO: Expedia's Demands 'Outrageous'

Oct 22, 09 | 1:57 am

On October 15, Expedia pulled all Choice Hotels International inventory off its Web sites after contract negotiations broke down. A few Choice hotels that have independent contracts with Expedia still can be found its sites, but just a handful.

In an exclusive October 20 interview with Choice CEO Steve Joyce, he said negotiations remained stalled. "They dramatically looked to alter the agreement," Joyce says. "We had an agreement from 2005 on, and we would have lived happily with that. They clearly sensed blood in the water and that now was their time to drive agreements. I believe in tough negotiations, but what they came up with was over the top."

According to Joyce, Expedia-which he estimates delivers about 3% of the system's business-wanted Choice to literally give up control of its inventory and pricing and wanted to penalize franchisees who did not give Expedia 100% access all the time.

"They were asking for outrageous things," Joyce says. "They demanded last room availability, meaning regardless of strength of market, if we don't expose the last room to them at that discounted price, we are not in good standing. And, oh by the way, they said we can never offer a price anywhere we don't offer to them... They would no longer be our supplier-they would become our revenue manager."

Joyce says when he looked at those terms, he couldn't sign the deal. He wanted to continue negotiations but was basically told, ‘take it or leave it.' "When we said we can't sign this, they took our hotels off their site within hours," he says.

External source: To read complete article 'Click Here'


Source: hotelsmag.com