It started with a simple focus: give travel agents a way to book the same hotel that their client is seeing online, at the same price and get paid to do it. By 2005, when the idea began to germinate, many agents were shifting their businesses home. The lack of GDS access made it impossible for agents to effectively find commissionable hotel inventory via the same tools that their clients were using: the Internet.

The URL HotelRewards.com was purchased as it lined up perfectly with what travel agents needed. And was simple to use as well. For years, the positioning of HotelRewards has been this: “Sell hotels, get rewarded.” It has always focused on giving travel agents and travel agencies the best way to find a hotel, book it and earn 10 percent commission. Even though the two sites have different names, the inventory for HotelRewards pulls directly from Expedia, the same website most consumers visit when shopping for travel, especially hotels. That provides a great deal of confidence to the more than 30,000 travel agents who are registered and actively booking on the site.

Confidence Is Key

Consumers are quick to second-guess any recommendation, and any price, that a travel agent quotes. HotelRewards inventory and pricing is identical to what clients are seeing on Expedia, making it the choice of travel professionals in the United States and in several countries around the world for hotel bookings. There’s no second-guessing and no uncertainty when travel pros turn to HotelRewards.

Depth of Inventory

150,000. That’s the number of hotels that a travel agent has access to when searching for the best match for a particular client’s needs, wants, budgets and more. It gives both the customer, and the travel agent, a myriad of choices that aren’t met by any other business-to-business hotel booking site. Each of these hotels pays 10 percent commission on every stay, so there’s no guesswork in calculating commissions or trying to determine if the price you are quoting is at parity with what the customer is looking at.

Most agents think it’s more important to have the world at their fingertips via HotelRewards than to have a slightly higher commission on far fewer choices, as some solutions offer. Indeed, you can find higher commissions on select properties at different times and through different sources if you’re willing to jump around, validate pricing, and hopefully get it right. How does the inventory on many of these other hotel sites stack up? They have, on average, almost 75 percent fewer hotels than are available on HotelRewards. If you truly place priority on serving your customers, choice should be at the top of the list when it comes to what you are going to recommend. The reason: Imagine quoting a hotel on the West Side of Manhattan that you are hoping to earn a little extra by selling, and your clients turn around and ask about a different property at a different price. You scramble to find that hotel on the screen of this limited site, but it comes up empty. You’re stuck, and your client is growing impatient. This is a losing proposition for the agent, and the customer, who will quickly grow frustrated.

It’s Your Business

Another unique aspect of HotelRewards is that it is your portable hotel solution, regardless of how your business affiliations change. You register as an individual travel agent and indicate how you should be paid; either directly or via another relationship that you dictate and control. Your ability to build a business and earn commissions selling hotels isn’t outside of your command. You are in the driver’s seat. Putting travel agents first has always been part of the mission of HotelRewards.com. Visit HotelRewards.com to sign up for free.