In the past couple of months, we’ve seen strong indicators of an increase in global travel, with heightened demand for international flights.
NB: This is an article from RateGain
This signals that recovery to pre-pandemic levels is on the cards. Newer travel corridors are constantly opening up, prompted by the easing of travel restrictions between countries. The moment is now ripe to cash in on this trend and tap into newer source markets.
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Attracting guests from countries that are seeing higher demand in terms of international travel would be pretty lucrative – driving up your top line and margins multifold. This is where country specific rates can help you make the most out of this emerging trend.
Whether you wish to enter newer markets, attract guests from specific countries or provide customized and targeted discounts, the simplest solution would be to opt for country specific rates.
‘Country rate’ is a feature of Booking.com, now integrated into our RezGain smart distribution hotel channel management software, which allows you to offer targeted discounts to prospective guests from varied markets of your choice.
Combining this with granular data on specific patterns or trends observed in different countries through demand forecasting and analysis solutions such as Demand.AI, you can easily optimize all your demand channels for maximum growth, with just a few minor tweaks to the rates.
Even after all this, if you’re not quite sure which countries might work best for you, simply head to your property’s extranet page and a personalized country rate recommendation made on the basis of collected data would be readily available for you. This includes data points such as holiday periods and special events occurring in certain markets that can prompt travel.
However, based on the prevalent rules and restrictions in certain countries, the availability of country rate feature for your property might be limited or curbed.
The Advantages and Benefits of Country Rates
- Occupancy: Setting specific tuned rates for each source market can help fill your available rooms, thus driving up occupancy and consequently your revenues.
- Seasonality: Remember, different source markets have different peak travel times, which can result in constant, year-long traffic to your location if optimized properly.
- Scope: By tapping into markets that have not been major drivers of business so far, you widen the scope for customer acquisition, which can over the course of time have ripple effects, bringing in more travelers from this new location.
Apart from these key factors, opting for country-specific rates can help you get more bookings internationally, where guests are more likely to spend higher than domestic travelers, and tend to cancel less often.
Most importantly, offering competitive rates automatically boosts your property’s visibility to the top of the rankings in people’s searches, as they often tend to predominantly filter and sort based on pricing.
Does it make sense for me?
After all this talk about what Country Rates are, and how they can help bring in newer customers, the biggest question to be answered is whether it makes business sense to implement it for your properties.
Seen from a costs-to-returns perspective alone, it is clear that more targeting leads to more business. Combining this with effective analytics, you’ll clearly be able to stand out from your competition and achieve much higher overall growth.
