Jacob took a small loss-making hotel at Laguna Beach of Florida on lease.
NB: This is an article from eZee Absolute
When taking the handover, he asked for the OTA credentials of the hotel. The owner said he had never listed his hotel on any OTA because he feared online fraud.
Jacob, however, understood how OTAs worked; and he put that knowledge to use. Within a year, his hotel became one of the top selling hotels in the Laguna Beach area.
Often abbreviated as OTA, the online travel aggregators or agents are the catalyst to any hotel’s revenue growth. Based on the bookings we receive from our channel manager, OTAs contribute to around a whopping 25% – 49% of the total hotel bookings globally. Without the help of OTAs, accommodations cannot attain higher occupancy nowadays.
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OTAs help accommodations orbit market segments that they cannot reach on their own. However, new hotels are mushrooming across the town every day. These hotels are also listing themselves on the OTAs, adding to your competition. It is only fair to find means and ways to improve OTA bookings.
In this blog, I have described 13 ways to get more bookings from the OTAs.
1. Achieve 100% Content Score
This is the first step in improving your OTA bookings. Think of your property’s listing on an OTA as its CV. Or, think of it as a dating profile. It should be impressive enough for the guest to add it to the comparison analysis.
Make sure you upload the most outstanding feature of your accommodation as the header image. No one wants to look at a hotel that has a WC or a sushi dish as their header image. Upload room images from time to time to let the guests understand what they can expect when they check-in to the property.
Provide information about hotel facilities and amenities which you offer. Further, update the latest hotel policies on the OTAs and take down the non-relevant ones. A guest does not need to know your New Year Gala meals policy if he or she is checking-in in March.
2. Maintain Rate Parity
OTAs promote your hotel on a higher position when you maintain rate parity. List all the room types and rate plans across all the OTAs. Besides that, keep a check on all the discounts you offer.
Sometimes, OTAs create discounts undercutting their commission to attract potential bookers. This creates a rate disparity issue. A regular rate disparity results in decreased visibility and hence lower conversion from the OTAs. Avoid it at all costs.
3. Ensure Future Dates Availability
Hoteliers often overlook the online availability of their property for future dates. Sometimes, you get so busy selling; that you forget planning for future dates. If you cater to international guests, know that people book their international stay well in advance.
Make sure that your hotel is available for sale on OTAs for at least 365 days from today. Pushing availability and rates is a regular process, not a bi-yearly drill.
4. Create Flexible Cancellation Policies
The OTAs have free cancellation or partial free cancellation as a part of their search funnel. This funnel helps the guests weed out the properties with harsh cancellation policies. 4 out of 5 people select that funnel while searching for a place to stay.
If you set a non-refundable policy for all the stay dates, your property will disappear from the funnel. Set refundable cancellation policies for the lean season. If you have a large inventory to sell, you may even offer a date change when a customer asks for a cancellation.
This way neither the customer nor the hotel will be at a loss.
5. Create Offers and Discounts
The guests and the OTA algorithms love freebies equally. There are various types of discounts that an accommodation provider should float regularly in order to ensure maximum OTA bookings. You can create offers like early bird discounts for certain future date bookings. Create a last-minute deal to sell whatever inventory is unsold.
Apart from that, you can create deals for the festive seasons, long weekends, market segments, loyal customer deals, mobile discounts, happy hours, discounts on F&B facilities to get more bookings.
Discounts and offers don’t have to be in the manner of cash rewards all the time. Instead, you can provide more value for money. When you extend the facilities like free early check-in or free late check-out, people who are travelling by public transport are more likely to book at your property.
Complimentary transfers, meal upgrades, room upgrades, free usage of your other facilities like a spa will also help you enhance the OTA bookings.
6. Incremental Travel Agent Commission for Better Visibility
Every OTA has a booster feature available to enhance the visibility and bookings for your property. You offer an extra commission for certain days on every booking or some direct benefits to the guests for booking from a particular OTA.
This feature comes in handy when you have low bookings despite doing everything right. You can also use this feature to get ahead of your competitors and pick up some bookings in advance.
7. Planning the Peak Dates
This is a very crucial exercise. Every hotelier MUST know the high selling dates for his or her hotel. It can be local events, national holidays, festival periods, long weekends, etc. An immensely neglected aspect is the holiday which does not affect your area but affects your clientele.
For ex. Winters are regular working days in India but a holiday season in Europe, the US and other colder regions. Travel agents say that Chinese New Year sees around ten million people travelling within the nation to celebrate it.
Create your rates and offer around these dates well in advance so you can capture maximum business from the OTAs.
8. Technology at Your Rescue
Regardless of your hotel size, it is mandatory to have different software that makes sure ease of operations. This software contributes to getting more OTA bookings directly or indirectly. Here are some must have software tools for every hotelier.
a. Channel manager
When your property is listed on different OTAs, a channel manager is an important tool to have. It sends real-time inventory and rates to all the OTAs. This prevents underselling, overbooking, and issues like rate disparity.
b. Property Management System
Another important tool that every accommodation provider must implement, is a property management system. Since the hotel deals in many segments like FITS, MICE, Corporates, Offline agents, it is only natural to have a PMS. When the PMS is connected to the channel manager, data redundancy is prevented. You save time as the PMS updates room status on channel manager, which then pushes the rates and inventory further to OTAs.
c. Revenue Management System
Let us be realistic here. You or your team will not be present on the computer system round the clock. Let’s say, a sudden holiday is announced or a music festival opens the tickets for sale at midnight and people start bookings.
Knowing you sold many rooms in the night makes you happy. But when you realize that you could have charged more for the same bookings, it kind of becomes a joy killer. Revenue management system comes in handy during such occasions. It detects the increase in bookings and starts increasing the price accordingly. This way you don’t lose the additional revenue from the OTAs.
d. Rate Shopper
One more tool that every accommodation provider should invest in is a rate shopping tool. The rate shopper scraps your property’s and your competitors’ prices from different OTAs for a given time frame. Now, if you are wondering what good it does to you; let me tell you what all insights you can get from it.
- Parity Check
Rate shopper tool checks your hotel’s sale price on different OTAs for a particular date or date range. If an OTA is creating any price disparity, you can immediately come to know and act upon it so you do not lose visibility on other online portals.
- Competitor Check
Keep your friends close and your competitors closer. The guests always compare hotels with similar prices, amenities in a location while they make a booking. If your prices are competitive, there are high chances that a customer will book your hotel.
Apart from that, you can get a general market trend and decide on the pricing strategy accordingly.
9. Managing the Reviews
Getting bookings is just not enough. You must also ensure that your guests enjoy the stay at your hotel. Ensure that you collect the feedback from the guest via the OTA they booked your stay with.
Your work is not over just by getting the reviews; you must reply to them timely. If a guest has left a positive review, thank the guest for it. If there is negative feedback, thank the guest for drawing your attention to it, take corrective action and respond to the review.
At times, the guest leaves negative feedback or a fake review to sabotage your reputation. Get in touch with the OTA and get these reviews taken down or reply to them appropriately.
There are review management tools available at your disposal where you can check your reviews, know the ratings and respond to the reviews as well.
10. Know Your Compset
In an ideal situation, every customer wants to stay at your hotel only. But in the real world, there are new hotels coming in daily and there are old hotels with a great reputation. Identify them, perform a compset analysis regularly and adjust your pricing accordingly.
11. Creating Pricing Strategy
The current time requires that we make a pricing strategy, revenue goals, the competitors’ pricing and our occupancy as per the demand to get more bookings. The pricing strategy helps you to sell at attractive prices, even during the peak dates.
12. Listing on different OTAs
Follow Buffett’s mantra; do not put all your eggs in one basket.
If your property is listed only on limited OTAs, you are missing out on other markets. While some OTAs cater to domestic guests, others have a presence in the international market directly or with the help of affiliates. Identify them and list your property on those OTAs as well, apart from your regular ones. Ensure the OTA is compatible with your channel manager to assure a correct flow of the rates and inventory.
13. Get Tips from OTA managers
OTA account managers are your best friends. Reach out to them time-to-time to get an idea about the current booking trends, new campaigns you can participate in to improve bookings. They can even help you to get a slot in booster campaigns like deal of the day which highlights your hotel on the top.
Prevent overselling by OTAs
Nothing is good in excess. It can lead to catastrophic results. Just like you should not depend on only a selected OTAs for bookings, you should not also depend only on OTAs to get your bookings. Try to build other channels like GDS, offline agents, consolidators, etc. Best would be to get loyal customers of your own.
This helps you stay relevant if an OTA decides to shut down or if an OTA manager does not favour your hotel over the others.
In Conclusion
OTA are the partners we need to reach larger market segments. Though they come with a price, the investment; if done smartly is worth it. If you follow the steps mentioned above, you would end up getting optimum bookings for your hotel from OTAs at an ADR you want.
