Amazon Planning to Venture into Hotel Bookings with Amazon Travel

Amazon is preparing to launch its own travel service, Amazon Travel, which will offer hotel bookings around New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Internet mogul Amazon is getting ready to make another foray into the travel industry the launch of Amazon Travel, according to an exclusive report from Skift. The service, which will likely go live around January 1, 2015, will offer travelers booking opportunities at hotels within a few hours of New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Amazon used TripAdvisor ratings to help select participating properties. Initial selection will be limited because Amazon is committed to only using hotels with four-star ratings and above. Along with hotels on Amazon Travel, the company intends to beef up the site with destination-oriented editorial content.

The biggest difference between Amazon Travel and other online booking sites is that with other sites, guests typically pay at the hotel for their reservation and then the hotel pays the booking site their commission. With Amazon, the booking would be prepaid — meaning the customer pays the full cost upon reserving, then Amazon pays the hotel in two installments and takes its standard 15 percent commission cut.

With the introduction of the travel vertical, Amazon hopes to provide independent and boutique hotels a marketplace they can use to bring in more guests. The company is specifically targeting this niche because smaller hotels don’t have the marketing force of the bigger chains and travel agencies. To prepare for the launch, Amazon has already posted travel-related employment ads online in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Dallas.

[Photo: iStock]