Rates GPT @ The Moment of Decision
In case you’re curious about why Rate Gain would buy Sojern for $250 Million…. The answer may partially rest in the never ending battle for hotels to reduce the stranglehold of OTA’s.
OTA’s have had leverage over hotel pricing. Please read the great article by Ashwin Kamlani (see link below)!!
Here’s why:
The DewDrop Inn, a boutique 150-room independent hotel in Miami.
1. Traditional model (before AI / before Sojern acquisition)
• Hotel signs agreements with Expedia, Booking.com, etc. requiring rate parity: same price everywhere.
• If the hotel tries to undercut OTAs on its own website, OTAs scrape it, detect the mismatch, and threaten penalties (reduced visibility, contract breach).
• The hotel gets most bookings via OTAs, paying 15–20% commission.
2. AI agent enters the scene
• A traveler asks their AI booking assistant:
“Find me a beachfront Miami hotel under $200 a night, with good reviews and breakfast included.”
• The AI scrapes rates from OTAs, but also connects to RateGain’s APIs and marketing feeds.
• Instead of just finding the public “parity” rate, the AI can request private, personalized offers from hotels directly (which are not visible to the general web).
3. How RateGain + Sojern enables bypass
• RateGain distribution tech → Connects hotel inventory and dynamic pricing directly to AI assistants and metasearch, not just OTAs.
• Sojern marketing & audience data → Identifies this traveler as a high-value customer (frequent leisure traveler, searched Miami recently, clicked on a hotel ad).
• Using that data, the hotel can deliver a custom, invisible offer:
• Public OTA rate: $189 per night.
• Private AI-delivered rate: $169 per night, with free breakfast.
Because this $169 rate is not public (only delivered through a one-to-one channel, invisible to OTA crawlers), it does not trigger parity enforcement.
4. Result for the hotel
• Traveler books directly through the AI → which integrates with the hotel’s direct booking system (powered by RateGain).
• Hotel avoids paying 15% OTA commission.
• Hotel builds a direct customer profile for future marketing (thanks to Sojern’s CRM/advertising integrations).
• Over time, more bookings flow direct, OTAs lose leverage, and parity clauses become less enforceable.
5. Bigger picture
• RateGain’s bet with the Sojern acquisition is that hotels will need both distribution connectivity (inventory, pricing) and audience activation (data, targeted marketing) to win in this post-parity landscape.
• It’s no longer just about “keeping rates aligned”; it’s about who controls the relationship with the traveler at the moment of decision.
