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To keep travelers on your site and away from OTAs, hotels must seamlessly integrate their booking engin e to facilitate online bookings. Include add-ons and upsells on your property’s website to increase revenue and allow guests to customize their stay with you. Watch the full session from Passport 2024.
Consider booking patterns, cancellation rates, average length of stay, guest preferences for room amenities or dietary restrictions, website and app metrics, competitor rates, and market trends—the list goes on. Decision intelligence unifies the full range of pricing decision-making through both OTAs and direct bookings.
If you are a smart hotelier or any type of accommodation provider, you would not want to miss the chance of converting your website visitors from an OTA (or any other source) and bag the commission-free direct bookings. You can easily set up your booking cancellation policy on STAAH Booking Engine.
4) Flexible Cancellation Policy Guests are looking for flexibility , now more than ever. People are even ready to pay a better price in order to have the flexibility to cancel. You’ve captured the client; upselling helps grow the revenue from them. It is one of the most important strategies for hotels.
In fact, OTAs such as Expedia have updated their algorithms to give preference to properties that have been called out by guests for their fantastic guest experience. In related trends, booking windows are much shorter and cancellation policies continue to be very flexible across the industry. Focus on customer experience.
Encourage direct website bookings, sidestep OTA fees, enjoy greater freedom when developing your discount strategy. Loss leader rooms can also become profitable through upselling and cross-selling. Discounts for guests who book direct. It’s easy with Little Hotelier. Learn more Why is discount pricing used in hotels?
A basic strategy might involve listing your property on a few key online travel agencies (OTAs) like Airbnb and Booking.com and leaving it at that. A specific OTA may help increase occupancy , but it might not actually be profitable for your hotel. Cost of acquisition – which channels are most cost-effective?
That said, one has to ask: why are so many hotels’ margins still being eroded away by OTAs ? The growth of metasearch OTAs often outperform individual hotels in metasearch positioning and cost-per-click (CPC) performance. Some OTAs still use cached pricing.
These sites may vary to include online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Booking.com , Expedia, Tripadvisor, or Agoda; travel metasearch engines such as Google, Kayak, and Trivago; GDSs such as Amadeus and Sabre; bed banks such as Hotelbeds, or online marketplaces such as Airbnb, Vrbo (former HomeAway), etc. The same happens with a cancellation.
These channels may include the hotel’s website booking engine, online travel agencies (OTAs), the global distribution system (GDS), wholesalers, and metasearch sites. When travelers book on your website, you can upsell them to premium rooms and cross-sell onsite services and add-ons like breakfast, dining, spa, and recreation.
Travellers are now predominantly booking their accommodation online, making it more crucial for hotels to focus on capturing bookings via their own website, OTAs, metasearch, and other online channels. Online booking channels are important for hotels because they greatly increase your reach and visibility to potential guests.
It’s when a guest books a room but simply doesn’t turn up without canceling. You’ve got the solo traveler who forgets about the booking, the big group that cancels last minute, and then there’s the mysterious disappearance act – no clue why they didn’t show up. There are a few different types of no-shows.
And yet, many hotels overlook metasearch in their digital marketing strategy , missing out on opportunities to reach a broader segment of travelers, compete for business with online travel agencies (OTAs), and drive direct bookings. Much like with OTAs, the search results then display a list of available hotels and rates in the destination.
Upselling and cross-selling Grab upselling and cross-selling opportunities with both hands. The best channel managers allow you to seamlessly connect with all of your OTAs and channels, and give you clarity and control over all pricing. Offer guests a discount if they refer friends and family to your hotel.
The use of yield management should factor in the costs of channels – from GDSs, OTAs, wholesalers, meta search sites and property websites to direct calls – and therefore how to better yield your inventory by channel, customer and more. This can involve overbooking strategies to account for last-minute cancellations or no-shows.
A secure, seamless connection ensures that this data is shared in real time, preventing overbooking and cancellations. This decreases your overall number of third-party bookings and your reliance on OTAs to drive occupancy. Decrease the high commission bookings from OTAs and increase direct bookings, which come at a lower cost to you.
Unlike Google’s Free Booking Links, this feature is only available to hoteliers; OTAs and resellers can not participate. If you’re listed on OTAs, you’re probably already listed on metasearch channels too. It’s worth noticing that you pay the rate per click, regardless of whether the booking is later canceled.
Here are some of the ways in which hotel PMS solutions can aid a hotel in improving daily operations: Increase RevPAR via Direct Bookings Online travel agencies (OTAs) allow hoteliers unlimited access to a large pool of potential guests, charging a commission for every booking made through them.
This strategy works especially well for lodging facilities that encounter seasonal fluctuations in demand or a high rate of cancellations. Hotels can increase bookings and lower the chance of cancellations by providing discounts to customers who make reservations in advance.
Dynamic upsell: Hotels can engage guests in advance of their stay, offering enhancements like early check-in, late checkout and room upgrades. Wyndham also debuted its new OTA reconciliation tool. In doing so, hotel owners can now easily unlock new opportunities to boost revenue and their bottom line.
It’s clear that OTAs, as well as major hotel brands are putting significant resources behind creating the best hotel rewards program possible. Alternatively, less expensive room rates can be redeemed through more aggressive upselling. Considering offering an early check-in, and / or free cancellation to guests that book direct.
Also, gone are the days of selling the majority of your rooms through OTAs. Making sure you get your fair share of direct bookings allows you to compete with OTAs and avoiding to pay the hefty commissions on those bookings. The graph considers cancellations and identifies peak or slow booking days.
Channels to attract them include: Social media platforms Organic search engine traffic Directories and referral sites The goal is that once a potential guest completes this stage, they’re comfortable and ready to book with you instead of one of the OTAs. For example, overly strict cancellation policies can deter some potential guests.
Reservations made on your website should automatically sync with your hotel property management system and across all your OTA channels so you don’t get overbookings. Once you know exactly how much revenue each OTA generates for you, you can develop a channel mix that delivers the highest ROI. No more overbookings. Pre-arrival.
It also aids in managing reservation cancellations and modifications, accepting reservations, sending confirmation emails, extending self-service facilities to guests, processing payments, etc. It also helps in upselling and cross-selling for more revenue.
Overbooking: Though counterintuitive, it helps mitigate revenue loss due to last-minute cancellations or no-shows. Channel Management: Ensures profitable utilization of distribution channels, such as online travel agencies (OTAs), direct bookings, and travel agents.
For instance, you can evaluate which channel is delivering the most reservations, contributing the most to overall revenue, has the highest cancellation rate, or which has the largest or smallest lead time. Online booking engines This is essential if you want to capture direct bookings and reduce the reliance and commission you pay to OTAs.
For instance, you can evaluate which channel is delivering the most reservations, contributing the most to overall revenue, has the highest cancellation rate, or which has the largest or smallest lead time. Online booking engines This is essential if you want to capture direct bookings and reduce the reliance and commission you pay to OTAs.
Also, gone are the days of selling the majority of your rooms through OTAs. Making sure you get your fair share of direct bookings allows you to compete with OTAs and avoiding to pay the hefty commissions on those bookings. The graph considers cancellations and identifies peak or slow booking days.
Reduced cancellation risks : The closer the booking is to the stay date, the less likely it is to be cancelled. Similarly, Phocuswright found that 30% of searches are on online travel agent (OTA) mobile websites, and nearly one in four on hotel mobile sites are for same-day or next-day check in.
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