[MUSIC] With their global vision of what's happening, OTAs are well-placed to understand overall booking patterns, including supply and demand, for your particular market. As such, they can provide the hotel with macro-level intelligence as well as deep-market insights that will be difficult to obtain otherwise. In the past, most of this information passed through the hands of the market manager, the hotel's key contact within each OTA. Since they typically deal with a particular geographical region and work with multiple hotels, market managers usually have a deep understanding of how the online marketplace for your city works and can thus provide valuable insights and advice on strategies to help maximize your business and profitability. In addition, many OTAs are increasingly supplementing this with self-service options on their extranet-based systems, which provide hotels with information on booking patterns in their particular market as a whole, as well as allowing them to compare their performance with customizable, competitive sets of other hotels. Such information is not just useful for working with the OTA in question, but can help drive the hotel's overall distribution strategy. For example, being able to see that your direct competitors are all consistently achieving higher rates than you may be an indication that you're underpriced and that you need to increase your rates across all channels. Similarly, seeing that the city is empty next month can help you plan additional marketing actions to generate additional demand for your property at what you have now been forewarned will be a very quiet period. Getting access to such macro-level and competitive data is a superb benefit of working with an OTA and one that will be difficult and expensive to acquire otherwise. Thus it can be seen that there is a whole host of highly specific benefits to working with the right set of OTAs. However, here the key word is working. Using an OTA is not simply a matter of signing up and presuming that the bookings will automatically come flowing in. As we will see in the next lesson, to maximize the potential of working with these powerful distribution channels, hotels need to actively engage with the OTA to make sure that they are attractively displayed and very easy to sell.