Evaluate a B2B Booking Product for Travel Agents at Agoda
Company: Agoda
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Agoda, and the team is debating whether to build a dedicated portal that travel agents would use to book stays for their clients. Should Agoda build it?
Give a recommendation and the reasoning behind it: which agents the portal would serve, what they would need from it, how it would affect Agoda's business, and how you would decide whether to keep investing after launch.
```hint Follow the incremental demand
A booking an agent makes for a client is worth something to Agoda only to the extent it would not have reached Agoda anyway. Ask which agents bring travelers Agoda cannot reach today, and what serving them would cost.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which agents do we mean: small offline agencies serving local customers, corporate travel bookers, or large resellers and wholesalers?
- Do agents already book for their clients through Agoda's consumer site or app today, and what have they said about that experience?
- Would the portal offer agent-only rates or commissions, which would need hotel partners' agreement?
- Is there a priority market, given how much the role of offline agents differs across the countries Agoda serves?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- The goal and the agent segment, with the demand each segment brings that Agoda does not reach today.
- Agent jobs and pain points, such as booking for many clients and groups, payment and credit, tracking commissions, and handling changes and cancellations.
- The economics: incremental bookings versus cannibalized direct bookings, commission and support cost, credit risk, and alternatives such as an API or wholesale partners.
- Hotel partner and channel risks, including rate parity and agents exposing discounted rates to the public.
- A clear decision with a staged plan, the metrics that would justify scaling, and criteria for stopping.
### Follow-up Questions
- How would you tell whether agent bookings are new demand or travelers who would have booked with Agoda directly anyway?
- Hotels complain that agents are reselling their rooms below the public price. What do you do?
- Would you start with a portal, an API for large agencies, or a partnership with an existing B2B wholesaler, and why?
Overview: A product strategy prompt asking whether Agoda should build a dedicated booking portal for travel agents. It tests segmenting agents, finding demand Agoda cannot reach directly, weighing commissions, cannibalization, hotel rate parity and credit risk, and turning the decision into a staged plan with metrics and stopping criteria.