The gray market of hotel agents: 0 inventory, 40% profit from price difference, 160,000 yuan a month

For the platform, the gray industry is a cancer that cannot be removed. And in the upcoming holiday season, due to the foreseeable popularity, the hotel black industry will be extremely active. In this article, we will dig into this situation and hope to alert everyone and the products.

Before setting off, Sheen felt that the National Day trip would be a disaster.

"This is a 'non-cancellable' listing. If you want to cancel the reservation, you will have to pay a 30% penalty to the agent." After hearing the reply from the platform's customer service, she was so angry that smoke was about to come out of her head.

A few minutes ago, she had learned from the hotel hotline that rooms that were not checked in on the same day could be fully refunded, and she had canceled the reservation more than half a month in advance, which fully met the requirements.

What's more, the room rate of the hotel she booked increased nearly five times during the National Day holiday. To deduct a 30% handling fee from the total room rate of over a thousand yuan is really an unexpected disaster that makes the working person feel painful.

Sheen decided to continue complaining and firmly opposed the hotel agent's blatant harvesting.

In fact, apart from the “non-refundable” booking, people’s bad experience in booking a hotel during the holidays may all be caused by the agents: the order is forced to be cancelled because the agent cannot book a room; the check-in is not possible because the agent filled in the wrong order…

Few people know how huge the business is hidden behind the two inconspicuous words "agent" when placing an order.

The agents hidden behind the screen, like industrious ants, move countless hotel rooms to various OTA platforms, and act as booking agents, customer service, etc., completing orders unknowingly and eating up part of the profits at the same time.

They call themselves "online hotels" and while office workers are hesitating over a few hundred yuan for a room, they seize the opportunity to make hundreds or thousands of times more money.

1. Earn 160,000 yuan a month and move wealth like an ant

After receiving the text message from the platform's "customer service", Ke Jing keenly smelled something unusual.

As a 10-year veteran user of the platform, this was the first time she encountered such a secretive transaction. In order to find out the truth, she showed the order directly to the front desk after arriving at the hotel.

The result surprised her: after checking at the front desk, she found out that the room was not booked through an online platform, but was booked by a travel agency over the phone.

It turned out that the wine that Ke Jing ordered on the platform was fake - the hotel agent opened a fake store on the platform, and after obtaining Ke Jing's personal information, they called the front desk to book a room in the name of a travel agency.

This made Ke Jing very angry. It cost 580 yuan to book a room on the platform, but it only cost 420 yuan to book through the agent through the hotel. After reselling, the room had a premium of nearly 40%!

"Who is doing such a shady business?" Ke Jing was speechless. In fact, in the corners she could not see, the hotel agency business was spreading rapidly.

0 inventory, making money from information asymmetry, local life O2O... As soon as Ling Ling opened the search page for "online hotel", she was flooded with sharing posts from various "successful people" mixed with Internet jargon.

In addition to sharing half-true and half-false stories, agents also know how to stir the hearts of workers. For example, after hearing such heart-wrenching remarks as "working 8 hours a day and earning only 5,000 yuan" and "still having tens of thousands of yuan in savings at the age of 30", they say "let me give you a hand".

Many people even appear in person to share their entrepreneurial stories, and while they preach the success story of "it's never too late to work hard", they intentionally or unintentionally show off their Apple computers, high-end red wine, and the calligraphy and paintings on the walls that represent "slow and steady wins the race".

If the time hadn't shown 2023, Ling Ling would have thought she had returned to the era of the rise of micro-business. She originally wanted to find a part-time job online, but she didn't expect to stray into a crazy world.

Driven by curiosity, Ling Ling added the contact information of one of the agents and soon received a project introduction letter.

In this 30-plus-page PPT, 20 pages are past "achievements", and the contents are all similar to screenshots: in an OTA service group in a certain place, someone sent a hotel order, and another person replied "received/following up".

Each group has about 10 people, which seems small in scale, but popular National Day tourist cities such as Chengdu, Nanjing, and Xi'an are on the list, and 17 cities of all sizes, including Shenyang, Guiyang, and Linyi, are also on the list.

In other words, this agency has a large number of small agents under its umbrella, and this agency alone has developed nearly 200 practitioners.

Such a sophisticated organization with subcontracting at each level is like an orderly ant tribe, moving wealth to the center of the group bit by bit, achieving the effect of accumulating small amounts into large amounts and accumulating small amounts into huge amounts.

"They mainly serve independent hotels, but also some chain hotels. The order amount ranges from 100 to 5,000 yuan." Ling Ling said that the agents in the group will settle accounts every other week. The big agents will take 2% of the transaction amount and give cash back to the small agents.

She did a rough calculation and found that for the 10 cities where the transaction amounts were shown in the project books alone, a big agent could earn 4,500 yuan a week, and conservatively estimated that his monthly income could reach 30,000 yuan .

In fact, this profit level is not uncommon in the "online hotel" industry. In some public sharings she has seen, there are many agents who earn 160,000 yuan a month - I can't imagine how much money those agents who hide it can actually make.

"If I could afford the 15,000 yuan franchise fee, I would have quit long ago," Ling Ling said with regret.

Compared to Ling Ling, it is impossible for hoteliers in the industry to sit back and watch when faced with such a lucrative way to make money.

2. Lure hotels and confuse platforms, and rush to wherever there is profit

"Brother Yang, can you help me see if this project is reliable?"

After receiving the message reminder, Yang Shi opened the dialog box, but when he saw the words "online hotel", he exited in disappointment.

Yang Shi is a senior hotel operator. Recently, many hotel owners have approached him to consult him about the inside information. At first, he kindly reminded them to be cautious, but later he realized that it would not stop them from rushing to "online hotels", so he was too lazy to bother talking.

According to him, the hotel industry has many agency channels, including offline corporate agreements, travel agencies, and online OTAs, business travel B2B, etc. Different channels have different prices, which gives rise to business opportunities.

On the online OTA platform, there are mainly two types of agents. One is the distribution agent he is engaged in, and the other is the so-called "online hotel", which is called a moving agent in the industry.

Yang Shi introduced that the principle of "online hotel" is similar to that of e-commerce - just like Taobao has flagship stores of Nike and Adidas, but there are also many specialty stores, and any goods can be sold on it.

For the agent, as long as obtaining the room complies with the hotel's regulations and the online listing complies with the platform's requirements, and the purchasing channels and online listing channels are opened, the bureau can be set up.

In the project book provided by Ling Ling, there is a word that accurately summarizes the business model of "online hotel" - hotel no-source e-commerce .

The "goods" here refer to hotel rooms. The project book shows that it is almost effortless for agents to get room resources: open Ctrip, Meituan, or Baidu Maps, search for the hotel name, and obtain contact information. In just 5 minutes, they can get in touch with hotel sales.

Afterwards, the agents will take out their carefully prepared rhetoric, denouncing the platform for "sucking the blood of hotels" and promoting the benefits of cooperating with agents in order to lure them.

This is also the reason why Yang Shi was too lazy to persuade the hotel owner anymore: the commission alone is a fatal attraction for the hotel. Coupled with strong traffic exposure, short settlement period, etc., few hotels can resist such temptation.

However, while it may be easy to fool hotels, it is not so easy to fool the platforms. According to data, OTA platforms currently have a set of strict entry requirements for third-party agents, and not everyone can get an "entry ticket".

But every time there is a policy, there is also a countermeasure. The solution given in the project book is that small agents rely on large agents.

In other words, after qualified agents come to the table, they will continue to copy secondary accounts like nesting dolls, providing cover for unqualified small agents and helping them to infiltrate the platform system.

In return, small agents need to pay a certain amount of franchise fees and commissions to big agents to obtain the qualification to get a share of the pie. As for big agents, as long as they continue to develop downlines layer by layer, they can snowball and make a fortune.

At this point, the true face of the “online hotel” hidden underwater has become clear.

In fact, this is just one way to play "online hotels". Yang Shi also mentioned that some agents would seize the opportunity of hotel group buying on Douyin, use credit cards and Huabei to stock up hundreds of rooms at a time, and then sell them one by one. Even if no one stays in the end, the money can be returned in the same way, and even the advance payment is waived; some consumers even booked rooms on Ctrip, but the agents booked them on Meituan.

In short, where there is profit, there are busy agents.

Although it seems to be a win-win situation - the hotel sold rooms and the agent made money, Yang Shi is not optimistic about this model: "In the long run, it will definitely affect the hotel's pricing system and hurt the user experience."

During this National Day holiday, his worries have become a reality.

3. Only agents are allowed to force cancellations, and social workers are not allowed to cancel in advance

Jia Jia didn't expect that her travel plan for the National Day holiday would become her "darkest moment" - within just two days, she was rejected by five hotels in a row.

After confirming her trip, Jiajia started booking hotels half a month in advance, but her order was returned within seconds. After that, she was rejected four more times on two different platforms for reasons such as "full occupancy", even though the page clearly showed that there were rooms available.

"Other than price increase, I can't think of any other more reasonable explanation." One inexplicable cancellation after another made Jia Jia unable to understand why she had to suffer such a disaster.

Doudou had already discovered something fishy. When she looked back at her order, she found that the seller column clearly said XX Hotel Franchise Store, which was not a legitimate hotel at all, but a third-party agent.

According to her recollection, as soon as she got off the plane that day, she received a "big gift" from someone claiming to be the platform's customer service: "Sorry, the order has not been approved, please cancel the order."

She refused to cancel the order, but the "customer service" insisted that there was a problem with the system that prevented the order from being confirmed. She immediately felt something was wrong, as there was no reason for such a bug to occur on such a large platform.

Facts proved that her intuition was correct. The so-called "customer service" was a fake and everything was done by the agent.

Yang Shi, an industry insider, is used to seeing similar situations. He pointed out that the reason Doudou’s orders were cancelled was probably because the agent was slow.

"After the guest places an order, the agent has to manually confirm it or wait for multiple interfaces to return. If the hotel raises the price or is fully booked during this period, the order cannot be completed," he said.

However, the hotel market during this year's Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays is obviously not favorable for agents: data from Qunar.com shows that as of September 15, the number of bookings for popular domestic hotels on the platform increased by 514% year-on-year compared with 2019.

As the situation gets more intense, hotels change their prices faster than they change their attitude. According to Yang Shi, "some hotels were selling for 150 yuan in the morning, but immediately changed it to 200 yuan in the afternoon."

The surging demand and the rapidly changing prices have clearly made it difficult for the agents who are responsible for manually moving and changing prices to cope. The time it takes to "confirm an order" has become longer and longer, and forced cancellations have continued to occur.

However, agents can refuse orders, but consumers cannot easily "cancel orders". Like Sheen at the beginning, if they want to cancel the order early, they have to pay a price.

"Because the moving agency is manually operated, the labor cost has already been paid." Yang Shi revealed the truth.

He also mentioned that not only consumers suffer, but hotels and platforms will also be dragged into the water by agents without knowing it.

"Hotels often have chaotic pricing. The platform's complaint phone line is flooded with calls. The business manager chases hoteliers three times a day to ask them to adjust prices, but the hoteliers are confused and do nothing. They don't know what's going on," said Yang Shi.

This is not an exaggeration. We can see that some hotel owners have reported on complaint platforms that their stores appeared on platforms where they were not registered for no reason, and the prices were much higher than the original prices in their stores.

A hotel owner complained on a social media platform: "Everyone says I'm expensive. I'm really being criticized. I feel wronged."

In short, the agent cannot book a room and rejects the order five times, but the consumer has no power to fight back; the consumer checks out early, which makes the agent work in vain, and the agent has to cut his hard-earned money. The agent even wants to "create equality" for everyone, including customers, hotels, and platforms.

IV. Conclusion

Faced with the "online hotel" agents operating in the gray area, Yang Shi had no choice but to express his contempt.

But the workers who have been the most cheated will take action. When she encountered a hotel that stood her up again, Doudou was not going to put up with it at all. She complained directly to the platform officials, and the feedback she received was: they would verify the situation, and if it violated the platform regulations, they would consider removing the merchant from the shelves.

Not long after, when she saw the hotel marked "temporarily closed" as she wished, she felt relieved: what a reward!

(All characters in this article are pseudonyms. Thanks to "Four Quadrants Hotel Classroom" and blogger "My Mom is Super Childish and Has a Vest Line" for their support of this article.)

Author: Cao Binling and Wang Xiyuan, Editor: Reno; Data Support: Insight Data Research Institute

Source: Inside and Outside the Table (ID: excel-ers), Insight Data Research Institute.