Originally Posted by deadreader
Assume 15% of all hotel nights include a fee of some kind.
Assume the fee is on average $10/night.
We know priceline does about 8.2M nights/year in hotel stays.
Assume 10% of those bookings are through through BFT's link.
A simple calculation shows that BFT is going to make $24,600 MORE a year if they can convince priceline to add the fees to each bid.
Never underestimate what motivates people to make another $24,600/year. BFT has proved it doesn't care about saving its users money when they deleted the Ebay Travel promotion from their site. This campaign of theirs is NOT about helping about the consumer, in my opinion as always!
(bolding mine)
Where do you get all your assumptions? It seems to me you are just pulling them out of a hat. In an earlier post (#4), you assumed that
5% of ALL Priceline hotel revenue is earned by bookings made through a link on BFT:
Originally Posted by deadreader
How much does her link bring her in commissions? Priceline does 8.4M hotel nights a year. On average, one night costs $60 after all fees? If only 5% of those hotel rooms are booked through her link, and she gets 2% per booking, she's bringing in $500,000 a year on commissions. That's a ton of money, and explains why she is so fierce about deleting any reference to the Ebay Travel promotion from her site.
She would rather have bidders pay, on average, $10 more so she can make $1.20.
I arrived at those figures by assuming that, on average, each winning bid costs $60/night, but Ebay is giving $10 in points if you book one night at a 3 star, bringing the total to $50. She would much rather you pay $60 so she can get her $1.20.
(bolding mine)
But in the later post (post #29), you assumed that the figure is now suddenly
10% instead of only
5%. Seems like you are playing fast and loose with the assumptions here. One can play these "what if" games forever. What if the percentage is really only 1%, or a small fraction of 1%? And the other assumptions seem pretty shaky as well.
You are really making an awful lot of unfounded accusations. Regardless of motivation, this seems like a good, consumer-friendly initiative, and I applaud it heartily. And I really don't give a rat's @ss whether it will benefit BFT or not, or even how much it will benefit them. (And for the record, I've never booked through the links on BFT, I don't post on BFT any more either, and haven't posted there for a long time. Nonetheless, I am not "out to get them," as it appears many other FTers are.
)