Top 7 Ways to Increase Hotel Sales
- Build a road map.
- Create guest personas to segment your sales markets.
- Sell the experience over the transaction.
- Use a channel manager and a booking engine.
- High-quality images are king.
- Get mobile friendly.
- Maximize your analytics.
- Final thoughts.
By offering current guests an incentive to recommend your hotel, you can drive direct bookings. An incentive can include anything from a discount on a future booking; an exclusive offer for other hotel services such as a meal, a relaxation session at the spa or a round of cocktails at the bar.
These days, OTA's (Online Travel Agencies) are the primary source of hotel bookings. Your rooms are probably already listed on a few of them such as Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Agoda, etc. These OTA's ask 15% (or more!) in commission and you can connect most of them to your channel manager.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in the right locations can help your hotel compete. You should focus your attention in the places that you know will be looking to visit your area. PPC and social media advertising are effective ways to attract a large amount of traffic to your site in a short amount of time.
Top techniques to increase your hotel RevPAR Primary Strategies:
- Apply yield management.
- Implement different pricing strategies.
- Balance your occupancy percentage and ADR.
- Focus on Direct bookings.
- Reduce Cancellation Rate.
How to Get Corporate Guests To Stay At Your Hotel or Apartments
- Update your website and branding to appeal to corporate guests as well as leisure guests.
- Make sure that the way that you take bookings, and the way that they can be checked, is “business friendly”
- Target whole companies at a time, and let their employees become your agents.
Here are three psychological techniques you can use to convince people to buy your book.
- Learn About Your Audience.
- Tap Into Their Emotions.
- Help Them Rationalize the Purchase.
- Use Peer Pressure Responsibly.
Get more bookings on Airbnb -The top 21 tips
- Getting more bookings is the most important thing for most Airbnb hosts.
- Build a complete listing with a competitive and descriptive title.
- Get verified.
- Fill in your personal profile, have a friendly picture and write an honest description of yourself.
- Wish-listed and referrals/recommendations.
Let's go through these strategies one by one to give your hotel direct bookings a boost.
- Have a mobile-friendly hotel website.
- Integrate a booking engine to your website.
- Keep attractive CTAs on your website.
- Get listed and run ads on metasearch engines.
- Perform hotel website SEO to rank on Google.
When you search for a hotel room on a travel website, does the website's software recognize you, and does it adjust the price display based on that recognition? A new report goes some way to answer that question. And the short answer is, “Yes, in some cases, but the price differences are generally small.”
The best room, rate, service and stay come right from booking with the hotel directly. While third-party booking sites can be a useful starting point for researching what hotels are available in certain destinations and at what price points, that's probably the extent to which they should be used.
Sometimes you can get a cheaper rate if you call the hotel directly. Look at dates, room type and price on-line and then call the hotel to see if you can get better rate or upgraded room. I usually get cheaper prices by calling the hotel direct but I always check out the online rates before calling.
I have checked prices for a hotel through booking.com and also directly with the hotel. For the same room, booking.com have come up 20 Euros cheaper than the hotel. It is because they block book many more rooms for the hotel and get a discount off them for doing so.
Room preferences: If you need a room with two beds, your chances of getting that room type are better when booking directly with the hotel as the OTAs do not guarantee room type for guests. That's because hotels give priority to reservations made directly with them since they didn't have to pay a commission fee.
Hotwire and Priceline Express Deals
One time it can be cheaper to book a hotel with a third party site is when you book a Hotwire or Priceline Express Deal. The only downside is that you don't know the name of the hotel until after you have paid. Priceline claims you can save up to 60% with their Express Deals.Always better to book direct than go through a middle man like expedia, orbitz etc. Even if booking direct is more expensive, less chance of a problem with your reservation when booking direct. Yes booking with the hotel site is just as good as a third party like Expedia, Travelocity or Booking.com.
Expedia offers two methods of payment for their bookings — Expedia Collect and Hotel Collect. It's easy for you to accept both types of bookings. The only difference is that Hotel Collect bookings will include the credit card data in the booking and you will charge the customer directly.
| Kayak's Global Hotel Study Findings for Domestic Travel |
|---|
| Cheapest day to book a hotel | Friday/Saturday |
|---|
| Most expensive day to book a hotel | Tuesday |
| Cheapest hotel check-in day | Sunday |
| Most expensive hotel check-in day | Friday |
