You’ve surely heard before that the big brand investment in direct booking campaigns trickles down to independents (by way of travelers being more aware of the value of booking directly). Hotel brands have poured billions of dollars into direct booking campaigns, and a report by Hitwise in May of this year shows that for some of the major players, direct bookings are looking up. For everyone else, not so much. OTAs still achieved an almost 3% gain in market share, while hotels lost 3.87% (Skift). So while ad campaigns may have paid off for the Wyndhams and Hiltons of the world, when it comes to smaller brands and independents, the battle for direct bookings is still raging.
For independent hotels, the option to throw massive amounts of money at traditional advertising isn’t usually an option. Nor, for a number of reasons, is threatening not to renew an agreement with an OTA, as Hyatt did over the summer. Independents must be savvy in a different way. They must calculate, invest in understanding first, before tailoring a specific distribution strategy going into 2018. Analysis then action.
Data Leading To Successful Distribution
I always imagine the corporate office of a big brand full of screens with dashboards flashing alerts and website stats and occupancy. It’s really far less sexy than this, but what they do have is the ability to see their performance stats with lightning speed. In order to compete, independents need the same access to the big picture—and it’s not Google Analytics. Hotel technology must show all the moving pieces together, integrated from your PMS, STR, OTAs, review sites, website, and social media can offer a visualization of just how the different parts are affecting the whole. But even that is not enough. Hotels need to be able to integrate alerts, track their OTA spend, pull reports on the fly, and more. When you have access to these things, then you can visualize what you need in terms of a distribution strategy. Here are some the things an independent hotel must know:
