How To Increase Direct Bookings For Hotels – Most hoteliers will agree that improving direct revenue is critical to hotel profitability and maintaining control over guest interactions. But direct booking is a topic that never seems to end. There is no single trick that can fix direct income, instead there is a series of many actions that will result in improving direct income.
During my years working in the hotel industry, as a general manager and then in a hotel marketing agency, I was exposed to the problem quite a bit with a lot of success and probably an equal number of failures.
How To Increase Direct Bookings For Hotels
A few years ago, another hotel marketing consultant and I put together a series of steps to check in order to optimize a hotel’s ability to increase direct bookings.
Best Practices For Direct Bookings — Soler & Associates
I recently came across the board and decided to repost it here. The thing with this table is that you have to make moves with intelligence. It is the quality of the way you take these steps that will affect the result.
I recently spoke with a hotelier who told me that they had tried all these measures but none of them worked. When I started researching this, I realized that some people stop checking items on a list – it’s not a list. It’s the titles, not that you made them, but how you made them.
For example, we know they will provide direct booking benefits to direct book guests, but what benefits? If it was free wifi I might not do it either, free wifi is expected.
If you do these steps and it doesn’t work, check how you do them, try something more radical. And keep changing until you get results.
Trademarking Your Business
This table is not meant to be the ultimate goal for hoteliers and hotel marketers, but should be a minimum value. How much creativity you can add to this is up to you, but if you do at least this – your chances of success will increase.
Table of Direct Booking Best Practices for Hotels and Hotel Merchants. Special thanks to Simone Puorto for helping me put this chart together. Click for all images.
As I said above, there are countless ways you can make this happen, for example, a very hot topic about pricing does not mean you have to put a lower price on the website. I will be clear here and tell you that this is the most effective way, but the inconveniences can outweigh the advantages, so get creative.
Not all actions are equally important, and some actions may work better for you than for someone else. It’s really up to you to implement and customize them to get the best results for your hotel.
How To Maintain Direct Bookings?
Working with students, hotels, and travel technology companies, I’ve found that slogans are often misunderstood, if not misused. A slogan is everything – it is a sentence that explains the whole company, product, hotel, project or anything else you are trying to promote or sell. In 2021, the biggest challenge facing hotels will be successfully recovering from the impact of COVID-19. The outlook is optimistic. With vaccines being distributed and the country open to visitors, occupancy rates will increase and it won’t be long before operations return to normal.
But is normal full of optimism? Even before the pandemic, when travel was booming, hotels – especially medium-sized and small – had different problems. In the shadow of online travel agencies, they tried to get users to buy directly. Lacking technical prowess, hotels must share up to 30 percent of sales with OTAs—the kind of partnership that has never felt fair to hoteliers.
In order to attract this part of the direct sales that they are losing, the hotels must match the convenience known to the OTAs. One way to do this is to implement a booking engine.
Unfortunately, hotels tied to price parity are often unable to offer travelers better rates through direct channels. But these direct channels are getting traffic. Research shows that travelers visit approximately 38 websites when planning a trip, ultimately visiting OTAs, metasearch sites and supplier websites to review options. Some also check the hotel’s website to see if the offer is the best. This means that OTAs are not the first choice, but the preferred choice, booking and paying for hotel rooms. Fortunately, the same functionality can be achieved anywhere using the features of the web booking engine.
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A booking engine is software that connects customers with travel providers. It is an integral part of hotel management that helps automate routine reservation processes.
Essentially, the booking engine allows not only to access inventory and search, but to do so intelligently, displaying information in a way that is more useful to the hotel. This functionality alone brings many benefits to both travelers and hoteliers.
Great user experience. The booking engine is the ultimate self-service technology for travel. Although some users (such as groups or first-time travelers) still prefer to talk to someone in books, most modern travelers are tech-savvy and need little help. In addition, they will look for platforms that give them independence in search and payment. As long as they have the option to choose Expedia instead of calling the hotel, they won’t make direct purchases. But the booking engine can match the OTA experience.
Personalization of search results. As mentioned earlier, the booking engine will show the results based on its internal logic. This is mainly to customize the search results for each guest. By recognizing the type of travelers currently browsing, the system will offer them the offers, packages and rooms they find most attractive. After that, close the sale.
Why Millennials Are Important For Hotels Looking To Increase Direct Bookings
Comfort for loyalty. In the video above, we mentioned that one of the strategies to drive direct sales for hotels is to run a loyalty program. Unfortunately, if guests have to call the hotel to redeem their points, they won’t get this sale. The booking engine takes into account all discounts and loyalty systems and automatically recognizes them when compiling the itinerary.
Better business efficiency. When hotel staff spend less time on the phone or emailing potential customers, they are busy with tasks they can better handle, such as guest monitoring and property management. Additionally, they always have up-to-date hotel occupancy information without manually entering reservation information.
Valuable delivery in the hospitality industry. The booking engine is a valuable source of data that will contribute guest and price information to the hotel’s analytics module. This data, automatically collected and integrated, will provide accurate insights into booking patterns to help you understand and better serve your guests. Or, if you are bold enough to use AI, the data can even predict your busy level, for example. To learn more, read our article on hospitality analytics.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. The booking engine is part of a larger engine that integrates at least two other programs – a property management system (PMS) and a channel manager. Acquired separately and then integrated or bought / built as a single solution, these tools cover all areas of effective hotel distribution and successful direct booking strategy.
Buy The Direct Method: The Hotel Marketing Strategy To Significantly Increase Direct Room Sales And Wedding Bookings Book Online At Low Prices In India
Now let’s take a closer look at the features often supported by booking engines that will help attract users and convert them into guests.
The main components of direct selling are communication, personalization and usability. Here we will cover the features that help build these elements for your hotel. Sometimes the solution comes with all the features right away, but in some cases you can find them in modules. In addition, most providers will support external integrations such as TripAdvisor’s review interface, so the feature set can be expanded. Either way, these are features that you will often find in booking systems on the market.
On Booking.com, mobile bookings outnumber desktop bookings. In addition, according to Triptease, the share of revenue from mobile devices has doubled since the beginning of 2020, and up to 35 percent of booking engine searches are made through smartphones. So having a mobile hotel website is the first step in ensuring a great booking experience.
The idea behind mobile-first design is that if your website looks and feels great on mobile, it will translate equally well to other devices. Although mobile websites are not apps (and we do not recommend investing in them if you are a small or medium-sized hotel), they should feel like apps and all the main content should be available on the same screen without the need to click on. across many pages. For hotel reservations, this also means such features
Online, Offline, Direct And Indirect: Everything About Your Booking Sources
Some providers, such as Сlock PMS+, offer booking engines as an integrated module with existing websites, while others, such as SiteMinder, also have hotel website design solutions. If your website needs a redesign, consider this option: ready-made templates with hotel-specific features help create a great, seamless booking experience.
E-mail is the main form of communication between the hotel and the guest before and after arrival. There are two main types of these messages.
Notification. The first
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