In today’s ultra-competitive hotel environment, every dollar counts. With rising costs associated with acquiring new guests through third-party platforms, hotels are rightly considering their most effective booking channels and looking to maximize business from owned assets like their own website.
Acquiring Guests in a Digital Age
Today’s costs for acquiring guests are at an all-time high: Third parties charge anywhere between 10-25% commissions for every booking they secure. These third-party costs influence the amount of revenue hotels are able to secure from each guest – ultimately impacting a property’s bottom line.
Hoteliers that effectively market themselves to potential guests, practice advanced search engine optimization strategies, and offer guests a unique value can greatly reduce their cost of acquiring guests.
How can hoteliers maximize direct booking through their website? The first step is increasing website traffic from potential guests and attracting more ‘lookers.’ What dates are they searching for, where do they search and what is driving them to a particular market? Collecting this market intelligence provides data that can be used to develop targeted marketing strategies that attract the right type of ‘lookers,’ the ones most likely to become ‘bookers.’
Capturing Direct Business Through Effective Website Design
If a website’s booking process is not seamless and secure, guests will book elsewhere . That means all the work that went into attracting a guest led to providing someone else a commission for that booking.
The website design should deliver an enhanced customer experience with user-friendly features that provide easy navigation and booking. It is also important the website can be viewed in multiple languages to cater to guests traveling from around the world.
Hotels should incorporate user-generated content from social media sites, such as user ratings and reviews, to assure guests of the credibility and service standard of the hotel. Since over half of online bookers search online reviews before making reservations, it is critical to provide online reviews as a component of website content.
