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Hotels, often reluctantly, are following the lead of airlines in battling discount travel sites by offering low price guarantees for bookings made on their own Web sites.

Weeknight stays at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center fetch up to $169 even in the slack fall season. But weekends can be dicey for the business hotel in St. Petersburg's Gateway area.

Staring at sparse bookings that would have left the 205-room hotel 60 percent empty for a weekend in mid-October, manager Katie Doherty waited until the last day of September.

An advertised $89-a-night romantic weekend package, including breakfast for two, had stirred up some business. But with no big wedding, bar mitzvah or corporate party in the house, Doherty decided to flick on the hotel's clearance-sale light for that weekend.

She put 50 rooms on sale at $69 a night. She alerted her reservations clerks to offer the rate, then she sent it reverberating around the World Wide Web on 110 discount Web sites.

For two weeks, she weighed daily whether to pull the offer.

"There wasn't enough demand to raise the price to $79 or stop discounting, but we doubled the number of rooms we sold," Doherty said. "It was not our best weekend, but we came out fine because we played our cards right."

Once upon a time, wise travelers knew the best hotel rates were available by calling the property direct instead of relying on a big chain's central call center or advertised rates. No more. These days the best deals often can be found scouring discount travel sites that have proliferated on the Internet. It's become so competitive that the big hotel chains are fighting back with low price guarantees for bookings made on their own Web sites.

In all of this, hotels are increasingly, if reluctantly, following the lead of the airlines.

About 26 percent of airline tickets are sold online. Only 13 percent of hotel rooms are sold online, but that's up sharply from 9 percent, or $6.3-billion, in 2002. PhoCusWright, an online travel research company in Sherman, Conn., forecasts that by 2005 one of every five hotel rooms, or $15.2-billion worth of annual hotel business, will be sold over the Internet.

"The unfilled potential is huge," said Bob Diener, president of Hotels.com, the biggest discount hotel site, which booked $1-billion in rooms in 2002. "The old ways of booking rooms were very inefficient."

The travel industry downturn that has lingered since the terrorist attacks of 2001 created a bargain-conscious market that increased many hotels' reliance on independent Web booking sites. Now hotel chains are acting to regain control from the Web discounters, but many experts say it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

The Web sites owned by the biggest hotel chains - Marriott International, Hilton, Starwood Hotels, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Cendant and Hyatt Corp. - together book half the online hotel business. Although there are hundreds of independent, or "third-party," sites, only a handful dominate the other half of the business.

In fact, Barry Diller's e-commerce conglomerate InterActiveCorp, which also owns Home Shopping Network in St. Petersburg, controls about 60 percent of the independent business thanks to his purchases of Expedia, Hotels.com and Hotwire.com.

That puts Diller in the middle of the battle with big hotel chains that are trying to reign in the independent online discounters even as individual hotels keep signing deals with them.

"It won't work," said Jared Blank, who monitors the travel industry at Jupiter Research, "because the hotel industry is too fragmented for the big hotel chains to impose their will this late in the game."

Travel agents get commissions of 8 to 10 percent selling hotel rooms. But wholesalers like Hotels.com get high-volume, deep discounts, then mark up the price they pay by 20 to 30 percent.

The result: Hotel customers enjoy discounts, but the Web sites get much bigger profits.

"Everybody is starting to realize the real money from booking travel on the Web is in hotel rooms, not airline tickets," said Bill Carroll, a travel analyst with PhoCusWright.

The Web-inspired changes in hotel sales techniques are sweeping.

"It's made us re-invent the way we do business," said Scott Watkins, revenue enhancement director at the Westin Innisbrook Resort in Tarpon Springs.

Some hotels hired people like Watkins, a former cruise line marketing executive, to juggle pricing and packaging daily, much as the airlines use their "load management" computers to wring the most money from each seat. Many hotels have hired e-commerce specialists to steer them through the constantly changing Internet landscape. But other hotels are keeping their distance from the maze of discount dealing.

"We're on the Sheraton sites, and we've got a deal with Expedia, but frankly we're staying off third-party sites in fear they'll undermine our rate integrity," said Jack Guy, sales director for the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater. "My worst nightmare is a guy who paid $150 a night talking by the pool with a guy who tells him he paid $75."

The Web has given customers the power to shop directly for deals they once could get only through travel agents or tour operators. The discounts used to be hidden inside packages that include airline tickets, rental cars and bus tours.

But the Web has not changed the four basic ways hotels fill rooms: retail rates charged to "walk-ups," group rates, wholesale rates and "opaque/consolidator" rates.

Today's big third-party Web sites are variations of the last two options.

Traditional hotel wholesalers get a volume discount for buying big blocks of rooms far in advance, typically reselling the rooms in travel packages. Sites such as Hotels.com also get a deep discount for a set number of rooms they sell under contracts that usually run a year. But they don't pay the hotel for the rooms until weeks after each guest has checked out. As long as rooms are set aside for Hotels.com, the hotels cannot sell them at any price. And the Web wholesalers don't pay for rooms that don't sell, turning those back to hotels only a day before the night in question.

Expedia, the biggest travel site, calls itself a full-service travel seller, but about 80 percent of its hotel bookings are made through wholesale deals similar to those on Hotels.com.

Consolidator, or opaque, rates have long been used by hotels and airlines to dump unsold inventory. Although the rates are low - on average 40 percent less than retail - customers don't know where they'll be staying until they have paid. One of the two big opaque sites is Priceline.com, which invites customers to bid for an unidentified hotel in a particular location. The other is Hotwire.com, which posts only the lowest price among several similarly rated hotels in the same neighborhood. Customers know only whether they are buying a three-, four- or five-star hotel (as vaguely defined by Hotwire.com) until they key in a credit card number for the nonrefundable sale.

Many customers say they have snagged deals for peanuts in top-tier properties. Others complain about getting stuck with a broom-closet-size room in a big-name hotel. "I've done them all, but I will not do Priceline or Hotwire because I want to know I'm not staying in some fleabag hotel," said Scott Stewart, senior vice president of business development for Outsource America in St. Petersburg.

Marci Moore used Priceline to book a stay in a Best Western in Portland, Ore. But only after a travel near-disaster. She caught herself at the last moment as she was about to commit to a nonrefundable night at a hotel 3,000 miles away in Portland, Maine.

"Priceline was easy to use," said the Seminole businesswoman, who owns a relationship coaching business called Magical Partners. "But after it was all over I think we could have booked a night in a Marriott property like a Fairfield Inn for about the same price."

And Ron Frankel, an assistant state attorney in St. Petersburg, called a Holiday Inn in Boynton Beach because he thought he might get a better deal from a desk clerk than what he saw on Expedia or Travelocity.

"They offered me all sorts of better deals," Frankel said.

For hotels, juggling four buckets of rates and customer groups was a balancing act before the Web ever became part of the equation.

"When you add in all these online travel sites, each with their own complexities, it becomes a nightmare for hotels," said Carroll, the hotel analyst.

For instance, the Radisson Riverfront in Tampa recently was sold out at $159 a room. Yet Hotels.com had the same rooms available and priced at $149. The hotel could only direct prospects who called the hotel to Hotels.com.

At the Best Western All Suites at Busch Gardens recently, the rate for AAA members was $79, and the best rate available over the phone was $89. Hotels.com had the room available for $65.95.

"Take the Hotels.com rate," said a desk clerk on the phone. "We cannot match it."

Most hoteliers try to avoid big pricing discrepancies. Some hold on to the best rates for their front desk and their Web site. Others try to keep discounts within a narrow band of $10 to $20. But relying on discounts to fill rooms is addictive. And some hotel managers concede they've lost so much control that they find their property listed at bargain prices on sites they don't even recognize.

"The consumer has become very educated about how this all works," said Scott Berman, Florida partner for the PricewaterhouseCoopers hospitality practice in Miami. "They used to just trust their travel agent or a consolidator to get the best deals. Now they think they can find them themselves."

Hotel customers have been flocking to the Internet for years. The Travel Industry Association estimates 66 percent of the 96-million Americans with Internet access do their travel research on the Internet.

But actually buying something is another matter.

Like those who research new car prices on the Web before heading out to dicker with a dealer, a majority of people who use online hotel booking sites still call the hotel to close the deal. They want to be sure they got the best bargain and that their reservation actually arrives at the front desk. That's a real concern because some sites, such as Hotels.com, still dispatch bookings to many hotels by fax machine, and the paperwork can be misplaced.

With the rising consumer interest in using the Web to research a vacation, many travel sites are being retooled as rich sources of information. Walt Disney World, which has 26,000 hotel rooms, made part of its Web site (www.disneyworld.com/magicalgatherings) a tool to plan trips for multifamily groups of eight or more that gather regularly for reunion-style vacations. It has consensus-building features to help the group decide what activities to book.

Visit Florida, the state government tourist marketing agency, rebuilt its Web site (www.flausa.com) this year as a vacation planner with features such as itinerary building, mapping and driving time estimates, as well as links to hotels and attractions.

Hotel chains this year made a belated push to get back control of rate-setting, and that has triggered a fierce debate within the hotel industry.

Like the airlines, hotels make no money if a room goes unsold for a night.

Yet the airlines can control pricing easier because there are only a half-dozen big players. The hotel industry is much more fragmented. Hotel chains, franchisees, building owners and management companies all have a hand in setting hotel prices. Each property has its own need to dump unsold inventory.

To wrestle back the upper hand from the likes of Hotels.com, the chains are discouraging their properties from wheeling and dealing with third-party sites. Some pressure their franchisees to reserve the lowest price for their brand Web sites. Some chains now refuse to award points for their loyalty programs to guests who book through third-party sites.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts and Intercontinental Hotel Group offer a 10 percent discount from the lowest price guests find through an independent site. At Hyatt Corp., the discount is 20 percent.

"Starwood's Web sites have not always had rates that consumers could trust," said Robert Cotter, chief operating officer of the company that owns the Westin and Sheraton brands. "This will ensure rate integrity."

Intercontinental, which operates the Holiday Inn brands, found in its research that 56 percent of online hotel room customers check at least four sites before booking. A third spend more than two hours searching for the lowest price.

"This is about giving our guests confidence they can come to us direct, cutting the need for them to shop around," said Damian Hinds, a vice president of Intercontinental."

Just as major airlines created Orbitz.com to compete with independent operators, Starwood, Hilton, Hyatt, Intercontinental and Marriott International teamed up to create a wholesale hotel Web site. It's called Travelweb.com. It is designed to compete directly with sites such as Hotels.com and Hotwire.com. But Priceline also has an equity stake in the venture.

The tougher stance by the big hotel brands prompted some analysts to question how long Diller's sites can continue to grow.

Diller brushes off the skeptics. The big chains' lowest price guarantees do not apply to opaque sites that don't identify the hotels before a sale. Hotels.com has been able to get 95 percent of its hotel accounts to renew this year. Expedia recently signed new deals with Starwood and Hilton for its merchant hotel business.

"As long as the hotel industry can only sell about 70 percent of its rooms on an annual basis, we will be golden to them," Diller said. "There's enough demand just in their fallow seasons to keep us going."

- Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or 727 893-8252.

The big players in online hotel booking and their estimated percentages of total revenues from online hotel bookings

The big names - Marriott International, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Hilton Hotels Corp., Hyatt Corp., Cendant and Intercontinental Hotel Group - control half the market with sites for their brands. To compete with independent, third-party discounters, all but Cendant united in 2002 to buy a site, TravelWeb.com, a wholesaler with 11,000 properties representing 100 brands. Pegasus, which initially created the site in 1994, owns an interest as does Priceline.com. Cendant, which franchises Ramada, Howard Johnson, Travelodge and Days Inn, runs multibrand sites called Lodging.com and CheapTickets.com.

Hotels.com - 16 percent

Owned by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp, Hotels.com offers 15 to 25 percent discounts in most cases at about 8,000 hotels. Recently stopped supplying listings worth about $75-million a year to Travelocity, shifting to its new corporate partner Expedia. Expanding aggressively into Europe. Hotels.com spends about $60-million a year on advertising.

Expedia - 12 percent

A full-service travel site also owned by Diller's InterActiveCorp, Expedia lists 45,000 hotels, but gets about 80 percent of its hotel bookings through a wholesale formula for 6,000 of them. Expedia spends about $247-million a year on marketing.

Travelocity - 9 percent

A full-service consumer travel site owned by Sabre Holdings, Travelocity was a reservation system created for travel agents but is now a separate publicly traded stock. Travelocity struck wholesale deals with 7,500 hotels after Hotels.com moved its 8,000 hotels to Expedia. Unlike Hotels.com, Travelocity pays participating hotels the day wholesale guests check out and books rooms electronically rather than by fax.

WorldRes - 6 percent

Controlled by Accor, the French owner of chains such as Sofitel, Red Roof Inn and Motel 6, WorldRes is more a seller of rooms at published rates than a discounter. It operates several sites that serve as an online reservation service for nonchain properties, including bed and breakfasts and small inns.

Priceline.com - 4 percent

Best known for selling airline seats and for its William Shatner ads, Priceline is a deep-discount "opaque" site that lets customers bid for rooms without knowing the hotel's name. Hotels, grouped in six quality levels by neighborhood, either accept or ignore the bids. Hotels use it to dump unsold inventory because it's usually a bargain-conscious crowd that wouldn't stay at their property otherwise.

Orbitz - 1 percent

Begun as an airline ticket distributor owned by several airlines, Orbitz has become an online hotel seller, too. Many of its hotel wholesale deals come from a link with Travelweb.com.

Hotwire.com - 1 percent

Recently acquired by Diller, Hotwire provides a star rating, a neighborhood and a price but no hotel name until you pay. Bargain hunters have one hour to take it or leave it in a nonrefundable deal. Average savings is touted as 40 percent off the going rate.

- SOURCE: PhoCusWright, company reports