TravelMole interview: John Sears, vice president of marketing and development, Boutique Hotels & Resorts International

Boutique Hotels & Resorts International pays agents standard 10% commissions, but also tries to encourage bookings by offering more incentives for clients, says John Sears, vice president of marketing and development. “Our incentives include early check-in, late check-out, and best room with a view available,” Mr Sears told TravelMole. The chain hotel’s Professional Travel Planner Loyalty Program has no minimum number of rooms to be booked for the special privileges, according to Mr Sears. He estimates travel agents book up to 20% of the business at 32 Boutique hotels across the US and in other countries. Another perk for agents who do a lot of Boutique bookings is for the manager to personally greet visitors in the agent’s name. “The big hotel companies like the Marriott offer incentives for travel agents to book directly and not through GDS to save money. We’re making the GDS system unhappy by getting agents to book directly and not through GDS,” said Mr Sears. “The end result is less traffic going through the GDS system, but more direct benefits for customers of travel agents,” he added. Mr Sears is among those who are predicting the demise sometime in the future of GDS systems, where he says fallout has already started through consolidation of existing systems. Boutique Hotels & Resorts International offers deluxe, independent, boutique hospitality properties, each with a different identity and state-of-the-art reservation technology. “We’re a niche of strategically located, architecturally significant, stylish hotels that compete with industrialized commodity type hotels,” said Mr Sears. He added that while boutique hotels alone are not uncommon, he knows of no other such collection of them. (i) Report by David Wilkeningf (i).