Coordination Contracts for Hotels and Online Travel Agents

Sustainability

Chris K. Anderson¹  Pengfei Zhao²  Qingkai Ji²  Junfeng Dong³  Qiang Guo⁴ 

[1] School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA;School of Management, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China;School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Key Laboratory of Process Optimization and Intelligent Decision-making, Ministry of Education, Hefei 230009, China;School of Tourism, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China;

关键词: OTA;    supply chain coordination;    contract;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su12083355

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Herein, we address a common problem of hotels in the current world of online selling, namely the management of relationships with third party resellers (also known as online travel agents (OTAs)). We highlight the role of OTAs in the current travel landscape, and we discuss the popular contracting forms between OTAs and hotels, which are the so-called merchant and retail (commission) models. We illustrate how these contracts fail to coordinate the hotel–OTA relationship, and then, we develop a new type of contract that can efficiently coordinate a supply chain consisting of the OTA and the individual hotels. We provide theoretical results and numerical examples for a one-to-one model with one OTA and one supplier and a more realistic setting with an OTA selling to consumers on behalf of numerous hotel partners.

【 授权许可】

Unknown