Two chains rewrote their price guarantee, and only one made it easier to collect
Marriott's best-rate guarantee now stops at two guests and needs a claim form. Radisson's just drops the rate. Your own guarantee page looks more like Marriott's.
by Markus Busch
A guest at your desk, holding up her phone. The screen shows your room, tonight, cheaper on Booking.com than the rate she just paid you. You know how this goes. Somebody sends her to the website. There is a form. She fills it in, or she gives up. Weeks later a credit may land. She has already made up her mind about you.
Every chain has a version of that form. Two of them changed it this summer, in opposite directions.
Marriott made its form harder to use. In June it rewrote the rules. The match now covers bookings of up to two guests. A family of four is out. She also has to file within 24 hours of booking, and at least 24 hours before she checks in. Book a room on Thursday for Friday night and there is nothing to claim.
Look at what Marriott pays when a guest does get through. It matches the lower rate, and then hands over another 25% off the room, or 5,000 points. Every guest who wins costs the hotel the gap plus a gift on top. Make the form harder, and fewer guests win.
Radisson went the other way. In July it switched the whole thing on automatically across more than 1,600 hotels. Its system watches the prices on Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda and five more. When it finds one lower than the direct rate, it drops the direct rate to match it and sends the traveler to Radisson's own site. No screenshot. No form. Nobody to approve it. The guest never finds out there was a gap.
Radisson also pays less doing it this way. The guest gets the lower price and nothing else. No 25%, no points, no credit three weeks later. And the booking that was walking out to the OTA stays, commission and all. Radisson says 19% more of the people who reached its site went on to book. That is Radisson's own number.
Nobody was ever arguing about the price. Both chains say the direct rate should be the lowest one. They disagree about how hard the guest should have to work to get it. For fifteen years the answer was: hard. Find the cheaper rate yourself. Screenshot it. Send it in. Wait. That was never really about the money. It was a way to promise something and make it a nuisance to collect.
Here is the part you can use on Monday. You cannot watch eight OTAs all day. Radisson built a machine for that, and you are not going to.
Go and read your own rate guarantee page instead. Count the steps between a guest with a cheaper screen and a lower rate on her folio. The form. The 24 hours. Someone in an office who has to approve it. Every step was put there to stop a claim, back when a claim was something you wanted to stop. She is not filing a claim. She is standing in front of you, still willing to book.
Radisson needed a machine to say yes without asking anyone. You have someone who can say yes. He is standing at the desk.
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