According to a recent report by Failte Ireland, international travel demand was back at 2019 levels for Spring 2022 led by significant increases in UK and US markets.
NB: This is an article from Net Affinity
Overall inbound travel is estimated to reach 60-70% of 2019 levels in 2022, and even business travel demand is strengthening. Improved air access to Ireland from Great Britain, Europe and North America is apparently also helping to drive search demand for hotel bookings. So are the changing patterns related to work – remote workers are a whole new guest type.
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Given all of this context, it’s important to remember what a huge part your booking engine has to play in your hotel’s overall direct booking success – especially at a time when OTAs are competing ruthlessly for their share of bookings. Direct bookings are less expensive than other online channels.
Your booking engine has (or should have) the ability to gather tons of very interesting and useful data which can be used to improve your revenue strategy. Extracting this data and applying it to your future strategies is the smart thing to do. Your booking engine is the tool that allows your guests to search for availability and book directly via your hotel website. The more intuitive it is is, the more conversions you’ll get.
Your booking engine works for you via:
- Direct hotel website (desktop and mobile)
- Meta search platforms
- Social media sites that facilitate direct bookings
You should be able to gather handy guest information which you can use to connect with guests and encourage higher value, repeated conversions. Accessing information on demand patterns, lead time information, search patterns is a crucial benefit to the tool.
As with every element of your business, your booking engine will work the hardest for you when it is integrated with your demand forecasting and sales strategy – this way you will be able to see how it can enhance forecasting performance and conversions.
Here are six ways to boost your hotel bookings using your booking engine data
1. Know when price and value affect bookings
One of the key factors affecting how customers choose hotels is knowing their price thresholds, and also knowing what’s valuable to them.
As hoteliers, you have to know when price plays a bigger part in converting than value. In some cases, price is king, and it’s the only factor in the mix. This is often true for many budget hotels.
However, at other times, what guests perceive as the value of the offer can be more important: uniqueness can trump price. Since the pandemic, guests’ expectations have changed and often, their decision is about a lot more than price. They are looking for more of an experience, they’re looking for the little extras you can offer them.
How do you decide exactly what your customers are interested in? What does ‘value’ mean to them?
Along with building solid customer personas, your booking engine can help. Look at which of your packages are the most popular, then look at their price points and anything additional you give within them. Find the common themes. Look at less popular options, too: are they too expensive for what they were offering for most people? Did they not offer enough for the price?
Price and value aren’t two mutually exclusive strategies—instead, combined, they will give you a more sustainable conversion strategy.
2. Look at rate plan lead times
Look beyond simple lead time conversion rates on your booking engine and dig deeper: examine the lead time of all of your rate plans.
Find out which rate plans convert the furthest in advance and what their common characteristics are. For example, have a look at which ones are:
- Multi-night offers
- Packages
- Discount stay and save rates
Knowing which types perform best will help you to convert more guests with more relevant offers.
If you discover that customers are more likely to convert based on value further in advance, work with that information instead of randomly running a sale or reducing rate.
Use your booking engine information to define the settings of your rate plans – find optimum days to set advanced purchase tariffs at, and discover whether there should be different advanced purchase for different times of the year.
