Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith has taken aim at Expedia and Priceline in a new video which has gone viral which highlights the massive commissions that these companies charge small regional and rural hotels and motels to take bookings.
Dick Smith's Fair Go Supporters has a crack at Hotel Booking aggregators about their unfair business practices. The situation is a lot worse for Restaurants. I've contacted Dick to see if he can help get the word about for everyone to 'Order Direct and Save.' Please share this video, because it is important that we educate the public the huge impact that order and booking aggregators are having on small, local restaurants.https://marketing4restaurants.com/dick-smith-takes-on-expedia-and-priceline-with-viral-video/?pk_campaign=dicksmith&pk_source=facebook
Posted by Marketing4Restaurants on Sunday, 23 September 2018
He highlights a range of issues that also occur in the Restaurant industry.
These include:
- Price fixing – limiting the ability of Motels to offer a lower price online.
- Adwords Arbitrage – running Google ads to have higher search results than a business’ website.
His concern is the impact that a couple of large multi billion dollar US companies. Motels are being charge between 15 – 30% commission.
The issues for restaurants are worse, including:
- Cybersquatting – companies that register domains that are close to or on behalf of Restaurants, often without their knowledge and without properly informing the customer.
- Brandjacking – taking bookings and orders on behalf of the Restaurant without the customer knowing that they aren’t dealing directly with the Restaurant.
- Bait and switch landing pages – Booking aggregators create a page on their website for a Restaurant that is not available on their platform and then offer bookings to other Restaurants.
I’ve contacted Dick to let him know that the exact same thing is happening in the Restaurant website. Large multinationals becoming the business partner that no one ever wanted!
Share this video because it is important that consumers know that if they ‘Order direct and save’, they and the Restaurant are better off.
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Is Poor SEO Killing Your Restaurant?
Too many times we see customers with websites that are costing restaurants thousands of dollars every month through poor design, poor messaging and poor SEO. If your website could be improved to bring in 200 extra visits per month and just 10% of those made a booking, and each booking was for 2.5 seats on average at $50 a seat, you would have an extra $2,500 in revenue a month. A 30% food cost, that is $1,750 in profit extra a month. This ignores those customers coming back as regulars – which is more profit.
Remember, if these customers aren’t finding your Restaurant, they are finding your competitors.
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