It’s a fact that in today’s hotel marketing world, managing online distribution performance, hoteliers need to activate various triggers and a very wide range of skills: The good news is that technology is a great facilitator, enabling more control and measurement, giving more access to a greater number of potential guests. Something that only a few could afford just a few years or months ago.
The less good news is that hoteliers are now at the very heart of a complex ecosystem, with a multitude of solutions and players, and it is not so easy to get the full picture of the most important solutions on the market. And it is even more difficult to work out which solutions are the most appropriate to fit one’s needs.
We have compiled this guide and a related infographic to help hoteliers understand the ecosystem of partners, systems, software and advertising tools every property deals with on a daily basis.
The objective is to provide you with an overview of the main systems and tools a hotelier can use at the different levels of the online distribution value chain to boost his sales, especially his direct sales.
Additionally we have divided it into sections to help you evaluate the partners that are best suited to your needs depending on the size of your hotel and brand.
The main categories are Individual Hotels and Hotel Groups.
Of course this division is not written in stone and often a small budget hotel can choose the same PMS or web agency used by a big chain, but it’s important to invest wisely, otherwise there’s a real risk of getting disappointed by results.
Methodology
We have categorized the systems and providers based on our knowledge of the market and our experience working with various hotels of various sized. We have attempted to include the main Global players and when relevant, the leading Regional players with an established experience but of course the list is not exhaustive.
We have divided the hotel types in two main categories: Individual Hotels and Hotel Groups, as these two categories have distinctly different needs and requirements when it comes to marketing technology.
