Hotel Booking System is a real-time bookings, fast and secure system, with no cost setup
If you search the hotel name in Google, you may find the first few listed sites is not the hotel, but the aggregator’s website. Click on it. What do you see? Half the time, another hotel will appear (not the one that you searched for). Quarter of the time, the hotel page will appear, but no booking form. Sometimes, the hotel info will appear but has other hotel promotions in that page. Why do aggregators do that? Aggregators host many hotels, and they have quotas to achieve. They redirect guests who originally was looking for a hotel to another hotel that require more booking.
This reason alone is good enough to re-think your online marketing strategy if you are depending on aggregators. No matter how well trained your staff is, how strong is hotel branding, you will lose your loyal customers is you continue to use aggregators.
Why does the hotel official site is not in the first page, first result of the search engine if the keyword is the hotel name? We explain this with an example:
If the hotel website do not have an online booking, guests will have no choice but to go back to the search engine result and click on other search results. The search engine see that the visitor spends much longer time in other websites (with online booking) than in the official website (do no have online booking). Therefore, those other websites is more Relevant than the official website. Search engine ranks sort search results based on relevance. Since the official website do not have online booking, it become least relevant.
Most aggregators have an agreements with the hotel that states that the hotel may not sell the rooms cheaper than the them. This is a huge constraints to the hotel marketing campaigns. Hotels who uses aggregators normally has 3 pricing (for a particular season and for particular type of room). They are Retail price, Walk-in / VIP / Reseller / promotion price and Agent price (aggregator price). If the hotel do not use aggregators, they can have up to 5 pricing. The additional pricings are Master Reseller pricing and Partner pricing.
Hotels cannot control the room price published in the aggregator’s website. It can be lower than the price that you offer to them. Large aggregators plays arbitration where they can lose money offerring very low pricing to bring in the traffic, but then try to upsell them more expensive hotel rooms or packages once the visitor takes the bait.
Hotels sell their rooms via agents (non online aggregators). The average room sold through these agents is 30%. For some hotels, this can be as high as 80%. Agents find it difficult to sell when their customers can find out online that the room is much cheaper than the agent offer. Therefore, if the hotel use aggregators, their agents will not perform well and eventually stop selling the hotel’s rooms, concentrating on other hotels.
Aggregators collect hotel booking fees. These fees are held for a period of time. Therefore the hotel cashflow status worsen when more rooms are allocated for aggregator’s online booking.
Hotels only gets the guest information when they check-in. Do you know that with online booking, the system also collect failed attempts, half of them containing guest contact information. These data are not provided by aggregators. If a hotel gets 10 online booking a day, guess how many failed attempts that the hotel can salvage by calling the failed attempts? The number is more than 10. This means the hotel can increase online booking more than 100% if they have access to this data.
Further to this, systems can also capture visitors info, recognize that the visitor is a new or existing customer. Special offer can be provided. Guest online behaviour can be captured. Visitor’s analytics help the hotels improve their conversion rate. Without this analytics, there is no measuring system to do any improvements.
Provide your customers current room availability status and instant room booking facility through your own website.
HBS is feature packed yet very user friendly and easy for your customers and you (Hotels). Get this system today for your website, if you do not have a website or you want a new website for your online booking system we can assist you in the setup process.
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