Competition hotting up

It was searingly hot and stuffy on Monday. Today it is even worse. Even Linkedin, which is advertising the vacant post of ‘content editor’ on the booking.com website, seems to be telling us that it’s time to go on holiday. All you need to do is go to the Booking.com website and choose one out of over half a million hotels, apartments, villas and boarding houses, or go to Airbnb with more than 34,000 cities and towns you can choose from, where you can soak in the local atmosphere by booking a house, apartment or even just a private sofa. You can take much more back with you than mere sightseeing memories, you can also make friends this way. Life could not be any better, and the offers to choose from could not be any wider. Some hotel chains, however, are less sanguine about the broad offer of less traditional accommodation, as they are now being forced to compete against such nouveau arriviste internet competition. The winners are those who understood a few years back not to under-estimate these new players on the market. They adjusted to the changes in the approach of customers by partnering with booking services, such as Booking.com or Expedia,as well as by investing in the latest responsive websites for mobile devices and ensuring that each hotel provides constant, high-speed internet access. This was the strategy adopted by Best Western, among others. David Kong, the head of the chain, explains in our holiday issue how embracing such technology allowed the network to prevail in the battle for guests. But enough about work. I have already booked a place at a running camp in the Karkonosze hills, but this is just the prelude to my main holiday. So it’s time for me to turn once again to the resources of booking.com.