As hotel and resort owners strive to improve margins by reducing the cost of guest acquisition, hotel marketers are increasingly focused on driving direct hotel bookings, with the major brands spending millions annually to evangelize the benefits.
And according to experts, brand.com sites are already seeing strong returns on these initiatives—although it will take years of ongoing effort to achieve a broad consumer shift—so the question is: What’s specifically working right now to motivate consumers to book direct?
Surely, promoting a direct booking strategy begins with understanding that different incentives and messages are effective for different chain scales and geographies. What works for a large resort in California may be very different than what is effective at a select-service property in downtown Cleveland.
That’s why it’s so vital to separate the actionable items from the generalities.
Whichever direct booking incentive you choose, remember that success hinges upon creating perceived value to stimulate bookings. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel at your hotel to do it—you can showcase proven, every day offers and amenities—as long as you spotlight those perks across all your direct channels, these offerings are often perceived by guests as exclusive to the direct channel, which may make the crucial difference when competing for bookings. Remember: OTAs have to manage thousands of properties, its difficult to impossible for them to keep up with every offer at every hotel.
Looking across our diverse portfolio, we evaluated which book-direct benefits have a low cost, but a high perceived value to guests.
Here’s what we found:
1. Enhanced On-Property Experiences:
Many properties offer differentiated on-property services and experiences to direct bookers, such as club-level access, room upgrades or late checkouts. These are powerful differentiators that hotels can offer, but OTAs cannot. It’s an important distinction to capitalize upon, since there will always be certain benefits that can only be provided by those directly managing the hotel.
