coditor

I work for an OTA and this is likely not Expedia per se, but the local office trying to up the value of their sales. Small hotels are always going to have more problems than a big chain, as they don't have any real time data connection to provide availability and room information. Either they send in their information and hope someone enters it correctly, or they are provided with access to a portal they can manage their own data in. If the local property manager is only interested in getting credit for high value sales and the small property owner doesn't have access to the portal, then likely the manager can screw them over so that people wind up at the more valuable properties. OTA's prefer data connections because that way the data is more up to date. It also means any errors are the fault of the chain (unless the hotel system itself has bugs).

By making Expedia aware of how their local managers are operating they might actually get this fixed. No OTA wants this kind of bad publicity. Just the US alone my employer (and its parent company) have nearly 300,000 hotels available. Keeping the data current is a massive pain at that scale since at the other end are individual people.

Also note that for most OTA's there are only a couple providers of hotel photos and one dominant one, and we all hate them as they suck terribly. Unless you are a speciality provider like Oyster or Hotel Tonight and can take the few photos you need, or are Tripadvisor and can get customers to take them, you are at the mercy of the photo provider.

So a quality bitching can get you better service (as a hotel provider) from an OTA. Even better is make a deal with someone who provides small hotels with data management (which does cost money) so that your room availability is all electronic.

The hotel business is all about filling rooms. The average hotel hopes for 70% rooms filled tonight. OTA's do provide a lot of hotel bookings so you can't do without them. But if the local OTA hotel property manager sucks there are 4 major players you can deal with (plus all the speciality ones). Yes you have to give them a commission (20%+ usually) but if you work with them correctly they can fill your rooms.