In the busy seasons of travel over the summer holidays and around the Christmas period, hotels often reach full capacity.
NB: This is an article from The Hotels Network, one of our Expert Partners
However, these periods of high volume bookings and occupancy don’t come without a price and can lead to missed opportunities. Visitors to hotel websites will often be presented with the dilemma of a sold out property and leave the site for another option without a second thought of returning, leaving many hotels without a way to recapture the leads lost during this busy period.
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Parkhotel Adler, a luxury hotel located in the heart of the German Black Forest, was experiencing one of the best problems any hotelier can face over the last Christmas season: 100% hotel occupancy, yet a lot of additional demand from potential guests who wanted to stay at the hotel.
Speaking to Daniel Bank, Marketing & Reservations Manager, he explained how the Hotel Adler tackled the issue of missing out on revenue due to a sold out period.
Quickly identifying that many visitors were leaving the website without coming back due to no availability over Christmas, the team started to look for an effective way to elevate the online guest experience and engage with those visitors before abandoning the website.
Their goals were straightforward:
- Identify guests searching for stay dates without availability
- Capture their contact and stay details as leads for the reservation team
- Generate future direct bookings from them
The Solution
Thanks to their partnership with The Hotels Network (THN), Parkhotel Adler found an easy and effective solution: Form Builder.
With Form Builder, Parkhotel Adler was able to create a customized website form to capture the information of those visitors coming across no availability. To ensure the relevance and effectiveness of the message, the form was displayed on the hotel’s booking engine, targeted to only those visitors searching for dates when the hotel was sold out.
With form requests being sent straight to the reservation team, the hotel team was able to capture a significant part of the demand of guests that would otherwise have to find an alternative for their Christmas stay, potentially at another hotel. The reservation team then contacted potential guests and kept them informed on potential availability updates, e.g. thanks to cancellations, or to help them with organizing a stay for different dates in the future. Thanks to the positive results of the campaign during Christmas, the hotel team decided to keep the form live all-year round, with promising results.
The Results
The form was launched in December 2021. In just 4 months…
- 87 leads have been captured from visitors who did not find availability for their desired stay dates
- 42 personalized offers have been sent by the reservations team to those potential guests
- 15 confirmed bookings have been generated resulting in
- €12,529 additional revenue from those bookings
A Word from Daniel Bank
So there you have it, with innovative and tech-driven solutions like THN’s form builder, Parkhotel Adler was able to capture almost 90 leads and convert just under 20% of those resulting in a considerable increase in additional revenue thanks to the simple act of capturing information from website visitors. The key takeaway here is that you’ve got to keep it personalized yet simple. Part of why Parkhotel Adler and THN work well together is just that – the common belief in simplicity.
Today, the Parkhotel Adler team continues to optimize their direct booking strategy, launching new campaigns and implementing best practices to help boost website conversion rates even further. Are you keen on doing the same? Learn more about THN Form Builder, and our other products to help boost your hotel’s direct reservations.
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