Increasing direct bookings – every hotelier’s goal in order to save commissions from OTAs. Online travel agencies have certainly changed the travel industry.
NB: This is an article from Trust You
As an intermediary between guest and hotel, they create transparency in prices and offer a wide range of accommodation. Independent hotels benefit from big names and major brands such as Booking.com or HRS and their marketing strategies and budgets. For many hoteliers, however, the high commission fee of 10% to 25% is the downside. As a result, direct bookings on the brand website have become strategically very important. Reviews that guests submit after their stay and their prominent positioning on the hotel’s website, as well as a strategic distribution, are vital. The following three smart review marketing strategies help hotels to generate more direct bookings. They might sound quite technical at first, but they are actually quite easy to implement and highly effective.
1. Integration of Review Widgets
The website of a hotel is comparable to a virtual business card. The more detailed and appealing the information is presented, the less travelers need to visit other sites, and are more likely to book directly. As reviews are critical to the booking decision during the search and booking phase, hotels should embed review widgets, such as the TrustScore or TrustYou Meta-Review review summaries, on the site. Widgets are programs that can easily be added to a website to provide extra functionality and improve the user experience with additional content. This gives the travelers a complete overview of the hotel’s reputation and they can book right then and there. No need to wander off to another website or OTA to book! Make sure that your IBE (Internet Booking Engine) makes the booking process as easy and smooth as possible for the traveler. Our Hotelier’s Tech Stack Guide gives the right insights into what should be considered when picking and implementing an IBE.
2. Activation of Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are extra pieces of information that Google allows websites to display in the search results. They appear below the page title and URL of the hotel. Rich snippets can include reviews, ratings of prices, thus providing valuable content that encourages travelers to click on the hotel website. In addition, they are easy to activate and provide a competitive advantage over the competition. Hoteliers can build up trust and confidence in their offer and increase click-through rates from organic search results. Combining the efforts of activating rich snippets and embedding review widgets leads to a higher chance of receiving more direct bookings. Read more here about the implementation of rich snippets.
3. Increased visibility by pushing survey reviews to Google
Guest surveys have a myriad of important features that affect the online reputation and visibility on the web and therefore, impact bookings. On the one hand, feedback solutions like TrustYou Survey help hotels to collect more reviews directly from the guest, thereby increasing their overall review volume. In addition, 85% of all reviews are positive on a global average. This means for hotels, that the more feedback they collect, the better the online reputation gets. Now it’s important to make use of the positive reputation and show it to get more travelers to booking the hotel. A smart way to do it is to forward the survey results to Google with TrustYou’s “push-to-Google” feature. This way, the hotel can increase the visibility of the collected reviews by displaying it on Google where most travelers start their search when looking for accommodation. More travelers see the positive and verified hotel reviews on Google, which again increases click-throughs and direct bookings.
