Unsold.com has been aggressively promoting seven-night land-only packages to the Maldives for two people, from around R5 500 in total. Some South African agents told Travel News that the offers were too good to be true read here . Travel News contacted the US-based OTA to find out more about the concept of opaque travel marketing and how Unsold’s business model worked.
If you’ve ever purchased a bottle of OddBins’ chardonnay from a supermarket, you have participated in an opaque marketing deal. Unsold.com’s business model works in a similar manner, where customers purchase a discounted package for a particular rate but only find out which hotels are on offer at a later stage.
“Our overall strategy, like Amazon in the beginning, is to gain market share in the travel space. Our goal is to be the Uber of travel and to disrupt the entire travel industry,” said a spokesman from Unsold.
He explained that Unsold’s proprietary software was able to identify the best margins compared with retail rates of major travel sites such as Expedia. Unsold was working with all major wholesale suppliers and bed banks to market these four- and five-star-rated opaque destination offers.
“If any customer is unhappy with the hotel choices on offer after purchasing a package, we have a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee in place that offers customers a full refund,” said the spokesman.
Advancing its disruption model, Unsold will be launching a new subscription model catering for flights and hotels during June. “In short, instead of customers paying the very high mark-ups of the major travel companies, they will just pay a low monthly subscription and be able to book any hotel they want at the wholesale, not retail level, for any travel dates with absolutely no restrictions. The customers will be able to make direct comparisons of retail versus wholesale pricing of all major travel sites in order to see the true overall savings,” explained the spokesman.
He added that Unsold was currently bound by rate parity laws that prevented it from showing the real name of a hotel with a price below the established rate parity price. “This is why, when you use Trivago or Kayak, you will often see all hotels listed by Expedia, Hotels.com, etc, displaying at the same price. However, with a subscription model, we will no longer be bound by these laws.
“We will also include free, a flight service that finds flights to top destinations from your home airport,” he added.
Md and founder of eBEDS, Cas Hulsbosch, told Travel News that these companies were trying something new, designed for a specific target market that was more adventurous and flexible in its travel needs. Personally, Cas said he preferred to know exactly what he was spending his rands on.
He said, while the opaque pricing model had caught on somewhat internationally (particularly for flight deals, where you only found out your destination just before departure), he said this type of travel would generally not suit the South African market for a number of reasons.
“Most international destinations involve long-haul flights from South Africa, which are far more expensive that the highly competitive short-haul LCC flights you can find to various destinations in Europe, for example. Therefore, because of the time and cost involved in travel to most international destinations, South African travellers tend to want to know where they are going and what they are paying for. South African passport holders are also far more bound by visa restrictions than a US or EU passport holder, which further restricts their ability to participate in opaque destination marketing,” said Cas.
