What is Commission

Discounting, a common practice in the hotel industry, used in order to mitigate seasonal demand fluctuation, was especially prominent at the time of the most recent recession. This coupled with consumer saving trends gave rise to the phenomenon of daily deal or flash sale websites. These are often also referred to as social shopping or group buying marketplaces and combine attractive discount for customers who propagate their offer using their social media channels. Though daily deal websites represent an interesting and multi-faceted e-commerce phenomenon, their nature within hospitality inventory distribution landscape remains largely unknown, even more so, their implications, particularly for the hotel industry. This chapter sets to fill this gap by collecting and structuring the available knowledge about daily deal websites according to the following themes: motivators for their use, profitability-related issues, marketing implications, operational issues, impacts upon branding.