Noble Travels Group launches Bid2Travel.com

New Delhi, Apr 14 (ANI/Business Wire India): Noble Travels Group, the leading provider of travel-related services throughout the Indian travel industry for over a decade, today announced the launch of Bid2Travel.com - India's first online bidding site bringing unsold, last-minute inventory of rooms straight to the customer.

Bid2Travel.com is based on a simple yet focused philosophy - "A room vacant for a night is revenue lost forever." This new site will revolutionize the way that tourism accommodation providers sell unoccupied rooms and provide consumers with a direct way to get the best prices for their lodging needs.

For the first time, Bid2Travel.com enables consumers to decide the price they are prepared to pay for an unoccupied hotel room within the upcoming 14-day period.

They can also pay a heavily discounted rate for a last-minute room. Hotels gain advantages as well, with the ability to offer confidentially proposed prices to a consumer online for - for either unoccupied rooms or distressed stock/inventory . or they can sell last-minute rooms at a heavily discounted price.

The site is especially useful for those planning last-minute vacations or business trips. Consumers and business travelers alike face many challenges when attempting to book a cheap hotel through traditional online travel sites.

For the best prices, it often requires advanced booking timeframes of a few weeks - if not months - to score a good deal. Bid2Travel.com changes the entire process for consumers, empowering them to make an offer to a participating hotel with a vacant room and receive an answer within three hours.

This unique site allows people to make their own offers for hotel rooms at approximately one-third of the price (or lower) of the common reduced 'last-minute' rates.

"I have a firm belief that a room vacant for a night is revenue lost forever. A property/hotel only has a limited supply, so this revenue cannot be recaptured in the future," said Pritpal S. Saini, Founder and Director of Bid2Travel.com.

"It's like an eBay for the tourism industry, except it is not a competitive bidding process. While the cost of selling a room varies from property to property, the majority of a hotel's costs will be the same whether a hotel has an occupancy rate of 57 per cent or it is fully booked," Pritpal added.

Revenue management is of growing importance to the hospitality industry. The Internet represents a paradigm shift in how hospitality professionals can optimize a business segment that is driven by perishable inventory, relatively fixed capacity, high fixed and low variable costs, advance sales/reservations and time-variable demand for segmented markets.

According to Bill Carroll, senior lecturer at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, "Getting it right can make the difference between profitability and non profitability."

According to PhoCusWright - the travel industry research authority on how travelers, suppliers and intermediaries connect, the past three years illustrated an unprecedented and fundamental shift in the supply side dynamics of the travel industry in India. Projections indicate that the online portion of the marketplace alone will surpass US $5.7 billion by 2010.

Bid2Travel.com represents a new opportunity for consumers to enhance their travel decisions. At the same time this initiative will benefit the accommodation industry, which on average has some 10,000 rooms sitting vacant throughout India each night.

"Increasing the number of people undertaking spontaneous travel will result in more demand for rooms," said Saini. (ANI)