During the era of hotel booking ‘battles’, OTAs have a wide field of influence on the whole hospitality industry. However, these is also a tiny ‘room’ for smaller or independent hotels.
When it comes to OTAs, hotels have to pay huge commissions which results in higher profits. Hotels resigned from an additional profit in order to attract more potential guests up till now, however, the recent research implies that it is significantly cheaper to book directly through the hotel website.
In spite of the fact that it is a quite problematic issue, there are numerous tips how to increase hotel direct bookings:
1) Enhance your hotel website
One of the most meaningful factors is…
What does it mean?
The website plays a crucial role while boosting hotel direct bookings. It should be maximally adjusted to the visitors’ needs. While creating your website, you have to keep in mind the appropriate visual look, user-friendly and intuitive navigation.
Apart from the above-mentioned features, the website should be suitably optimized for search engines - the higher position in the results means the larger number of potential visitors.
In addition, your website has to include a proper content and be as responsive as possible in order to generate enough traffic on it.
2) Lower prices and loyalty program
The further significant action is to…
In fact, OTAs parity agreements effectively prevent hotels from offering more attractive prices to their guests, there are various ways to offer them different discounts. E-mail subscribers, loyalty programs members or social media followers are frequently entitled to more appealing prices. This process intrinsically leads to the increase in direct hotel website bookings.
At last, who does not like special discounts?
3) The power of guests’ reviews and social media
Apart from introducing loyalty programs, the large part of hotel owners decide to take advantage of social media. The effectiveness of setting up a channel on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram lies in the proper content in the form of attractive posts, photos and videos connected with the given hotel or destination.
Remember about sharing the link to your hotel website wherever possible!
You can also gain guests’ interest in your property by writing a blog or implementing a widget dedicated to reviews and comments on your hotel because…
4) Rise your hotel to a higher technological level
Due to the increasing technological progress, the majority of industries take advantage of various technological tools or devices which constitute unquestionable facilitation for potential guests.
A stunning example of such tool is a hotel website widget which is more and more often used while creating hotel website. There are manifold kinds of applications which are making a splash on the travel market, however, one of the most outstanding is Our.Guide widget.
Characterized by a huge functionality, as well as intuitive navigation, it provides customized guides and rich database of the most popular attractions and events near the certain hotel.
You will surely achieve a success in increasing hotel direct bookings by providing such solution to your guests.
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