Zuji.com.au have rearranged the Australian OTA landscape by announcing that they will no longer be charging a booking fee for bookings made on their website. Expedia have also jumped on the bandwagon, offering no booking fees for 6 weeks but will drop the fees permanently if they reach over a million unique site visits during the trial.

The fees were a very outdated practice to begin with and have already been removed in most other countries, but nothing will stop these OTAs from increasing their mark-up percentage to compensate for the loss. The average consumer will see these changes as a benefit; that these companies are giving back to their loyal customers in a time of economic hardship, but are they really doing anything more than aligning Australian businesses practices with those of the rest of the world and recouping the loss with a price hike?

I am very interested to hear others opinions on this, do you see this as smoke and mirrors or a genuine attempt to give something back to the Australian traveller?

Read the original article from etravelblackboard here