Peter O'Connor: 'The whole area of online distribution for hotels is one that is constantly evolving and it’s really confusing. And there are few hotel companies that really get it at the moment. Many peoples’ knowledge is probably two to three years out of date. So for example on the panel this morning the representative from Expedia was getting a really hard time. Now, Expedia 10 years ago was probably a naughty company, they were probably doing some things that weren’t good for hotels. But that’s evolved. And I found it amazing that the audience hasn’t actually evolved in their perception of the company. But OTAs, online travel agents, they’re partners. If you work with them they can deliver a business to you, it’s expensive but they’re providing a service, they’re putting heads in beds. So as a result they deserve to be rewarded. The key challenge we have for hotels working with OTAs is they don’t work with OTAs, they begrudgingly give them rooms and moan about the fact that they have to pay so much afterwards. But most hotels are running at 60% occupancy, maybe 65, that means one-third of their rooms are sitting idle every night. I’m a businessman, at the end of the day I would prefer to sell those rooms at 75% or 55% or even 50% rather than not sell them at all. And yes, you can talk about the damage to your brand, you can talk about so many different problems, but at the end of the day we have to make money. The other area that was quite interesting today as well is we were talking about developing business models, so one of the models that’s developing most rapidly at the moment is the whole area of flash sales. And today we were lucky, we had a representative from Groupon on the panel and again this is a model that’s misunderstood by many hoteliers. They see a large cost without seeing the benefits that Groupon can bring in terms of reach, in terms of targeting. They all say, “Oh, it’s easy, we could do this for ourselves.” But actually in reality if they try to do it for themselves it would be much more expensive."