6+1 ways to increase your hotel’s revenue, using the OTA’s visibility
The direct booking wars will not be fought by laying out the evidence to parliamentary committees, but in the hearts of consumers. Still, the arguments and the evidence are definitely worth reading
— Jason Clampet (Skift.com Co-founder and Editor in Chief)
A search in google for the 'OTAs' will return 18.500.000 results and many of them refer to the Online Travel Agencies.
In the Tourism Sector, the term OTA is found amongst the most discussed themes.
More specifically, the OTAs are Online Travel Companies such a booking.com, expedia, hotels.com etc, that allow consumers to book various travel related services through their websites. The main services booked are the accommodation / hotel services, but these also include cars, flights, packages etc.
In a hotel's booking statistics , OTAs very often account for a significant percentage (often 50% or more) from the overall online guests. This is a fact that causes frustration to the hotel owners / managers, mainly due to the fact that they pay a great amount of commissions (usually up to 20%) of the total revenue to the Online Travel Agencies. The amounts paid to the OTAs, along with the fact that very often there is allotment for rooms, causing availability issues, causes the hotel managers or reservations managers not to update these channels often, with information, photos or special offers.
However the booking channels should not be engaged in a battle between them and the hotels. Nor should the hotels try to to identify which channel performs better. Instead the hoteliers should focus in maximizing the sales of each channel separately, so that as a whole, the online revenue from online travelers will increase.
There are many advantages of cooperating with OTAs, and these are some of the most important.
- The hotels gain more publicity when showing up in results, when guests search for a destination and use a filter (such as bed and breakfast, stars, review rating etc)
- When the hotel ranking increases, the visibility increases and this usually results to an increase in bookings (conversion rate)
- As the hotels receive more bookings, there are more opportunities for the hotel to gain more direct guests, up-sell products or services, gain more reviews
- More potential customers enter the hotel's website in order to retrieve more information and they could ask the hotel for a direct quote or book through the hotel's booking engine.
These all sound wonderful, but if you are asking what is the way of being successful, there is no specific recipe. However there are steps that can be followed and can contribute to the hotel's overall strategy, increasing the fame of the hotel and ultimately the revenue.
1. Always pay attention to how your hotel looks on the OTAs. There is great competition out there and your hotel should always look its best. Make sure that your central photo is appealing and always make sure that your content is 100% updated.
2. Make sure that you check your competitors rates and information frequently, ideally by creating a procedure and record any number that is significant to you and that you also measure for your business. (such as number of reviews, etc)
3. Did you know that the cancellation rate in booking.com is usually higher than in other channels? This means that the hotels should do their best in capturing the guests attention and maintain their interest. Usually welcome letters with information that will be useful to the guest have a positive impact and it might prevent someone from cancelling the reservation.
4. Many of the guests visit meta search & review sites (Such as trivago, tripadvisor or even google plus), thus it is important that you do not confuse the them with different rates in different channels. The guest will not be certain as to what is included in the rates, which room the price refers to and why the rate is different. As a result the potential guest might not book your hotel or they will simply book the lower rate. So, make sure that your rates are correct, the same in all channels, and perform frequent 'parity checks'
5.When a guest cancels, assuming you have their contact information, send them a follow up letter asking for the cancellation reason.
6. Make sure that you receive as many online reviews as possible. This will help you identify your strong points and weaknesses and will increase your hotel's visibility and trust. It is of course recommended that you address any issues mentioned and respond to all traveler reviews.
7. Creating a 'branding ad' (at least). When someone already knows your hotel and searches for your hotel's name in a search engine, there is a great possibility that they wish to book their holiday. Make sure that your hotel's website stands high (or even first) when someone searches for it, and make sure that the description and ad extensions are used wisely.
We hope that the above will be helpful, we welcome any comments or questions you may have at [email protected]
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