Price Matching: OTAs are doing it, should you?

Expedia has heavily invested in its ARM (Automatic Rate Match) tool to ensure it offers the best prices and wins bookings on its platform. With billion-dollar budgets and countless hours spent researching guest behavior, Expedia sets a clear example. The fact that they prioritize rate matching sends a strong signal that hotels should seriously consider doing the same. Price matching is not just a trend but a tactic for staying competitive.

So the question is: If OTAs are doing it, should you?

E-commerce giants have perfected this strategy

The use of price matching is not unique to OTAs. E-commerce giants like Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy have perfected price matching to retain their customer base. They rely on dynamic pricing tools to remain competitive, a strategy similar to Expedia’s Rate Match approach. By automating price adjustments, these brands ensure they offer the best deals without manual intervention.

Hotels' approach to price matching: manual and resource-intensive

Many hotels have adopted manual or blanket approaches to price matching:

• Manual price matching: Hotels often dedicate hours each week to manually adjusting prices to keep up with major OTAs or customer requests at the reservation desk.
• Blanket discounts: Some hotels offer steep, blanket discounts of up to 20% to compete with competitors.

But in reality, these approaches are slow. It wastes time and budget.

It’s time for hoteliers to invest in smart marketing tools that eliminate the hard work and allow them to focus on what matters most: delivering great guest experiences

How hotels can do it better: Auto-match OTA prices

• Hotels can streamline and improve their price matching strategies by using automation tools like Triptease’s On-site Price Match, which works in a similar vain to how OTAs Rate Match but gives hotels more control (and more direct bookings!) with automation:

  • Automated price matching that you control: Select which OTAs to price match and the discounts you’d be happy to provide. Triptease applies the minimum possible discount to win booking. You stay in control and OTA undercutting is gone.
  • Small discounts, big wins: Data shows that direct prices only need to match or be slightly lower than OTA rates to win the booking, so lose the blanket offers and focus on targeted, precision discounts.
  • Self-serve performance data and instant insights: See impressions, clicks, bookings and revenue as well as your price competitiveness vs OTAs and which discounts drive the most impressions and clicks
  
  

   

Why hotels should drop outdated blanket discounts

According to Triptease data, hotels that are slightly cheaper than OTAs still win a significant share of bookings.

The left side of the graph shows that as OTAs like Expedia undercut your rates by increasing amounts (e.g., 5% or 10% cheaper), your website's click-through rate (CTR) steadily decreases. In contrast, on the right side, when hotels price themselves just slightly cheaper than OTAs (even by as little as 5%), the CTR remains strong. This illustrates that hotels don’t need to offer deep discounts to stay competitive—being just a little cheaper can have a big impact on winning direct bookings.

This insight shows that hotels don’t need to slash prices to outpace OTAs like Expedia. Instead, a slight discount, combined with the advantages of direct bookings (e.g., avoiding third-party issues like room availability errors), is enough to win a guest's preference.

By adopting automated price-matching tools like Triptease’s On-site Price Match, hotels can rely less on OTA tactics like Expedia ARM and use a tool that reduces OTA commissions while increasing direct revenue.

OTAs lead the way with aggressive rate-matching strategies, but hotels don’t have to fall behind. By automating rate matching and using small discounts, hotels can maintain their competitiveness without hurting their bottom line.

With tools like Triptease’s On-site Price Match, hotels can strike the perfect balance between price competitiveness and profitability while ensuring they continue to win direct bookings.

Want to learn more about Triptease Price Match, and how it can boost your pricing strategy? Get in touch with our team of experts today.