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Do you want more online bookings for your hotel? Work on improving your revenue and occupancy rates? Many hoteliers are largely dependent on supply and demand and let external booking sites such as Booking.com do the work for them. Why you should focus on obtaining more direct bookings and how to do this is what you will read in this article.
Why work on more (direct) online bookings?
In my opinion, this should be a daily task for hoteliers. There are plenty of reasons to set goals in numbers or percentages when it comes to direct bookings. By this, we mean bookings that you receive through your own efforts. You can only say that you are truly engaged with your business if you continuously pay attention to obtaining direct bookings. Although this is often part of your role as a hotelier, it is an aspect that often deserves more attention.
- Save significantly on commission costs
- You are in control and operate more independently. What if an external booking site yields less, adjusts their policies or offerings, goes bankrupt, or simply stops existing? Prevent being at the mercy of external sales channels!
- Maintain (or gain) market position to stay ahead of your competitors. Even if a competitor opens across the street tomorrow, you do not want to lose your territory.
- In tougher times, you know what actions to take to ensure availability in your hotel, or at least stabilize it and maximize your output.
- More dynamic in bookings. Because you control your pace, you have much more influence over your occupancy rates.
- A working formula is a matter of multiplying!
- Only a working formula is a reason to add value to your business. Instead of bookings that come your way passively, you become autonomously independent. Sooner or later, you will reap the benefits.
Set goals for the number of bookings (or a percentage of total bookings)
Setting a goal is one thing, meeting it (and continuously following up) is another story. Especially when things are going well (and the hotel is often busy) priorities can change. A few tips for setting a goal:
- Don’t set the bar too high. You’ll be much more motivated by achieving goals than by failing to reach them. If you achieve the desired result, simply set another goal! :)
- Monitor your goal to see if you are on track
- Incorporate realistic time investment in your schedule. You won't be able to sustain radical changes in your planning for long without impacting your other tasks too much.
- An hour a day quickly amounts to 245 hours a year working towards your goals! Achievable, realistic, and certainly resulting in success.
- Start the day by working on your goal for more online bookings. If you work out in the morning, you are much less likely to come up with an excuse not to go.
- Involve your colleagues and ensure they are aware of your goals and what percentage/number of direct bookings you want to achieve by a certain date. This slightly deviates from increasing your online bookings but is certainly interesting and should not be overlooked.
- Even better, come up with a competition with your colleagues. Reward and acknowledge those who bring in bookings and engage in friendly competition with each other (see our practical example below).
Jasper, one of the founders of MyTourist, spends his free time creating wooden furniture among other things. For our office, he made a wooden frame with a whiteboard inside. Nowadays, it serves as a sales board, where we collectively engage in friendly competition. When we convince a new customer, that colleague gets to mark a tally next to their name. Each quarter the 'tally master' is chosen and receives eternal glory. The result? A successful and healthy competition that motivates colleagues to maintain or acquire the most tallies. We have managed to double the number of ‘direct’ convictions (meaning the audience that does not independently purchase our hotel software through our website) by doing this! Adapt this to the number of ‘direct bookings’ in your hotel.
Work ON your hotel, not IN your hotel!
Many hoteliers prefer to spend time with guests rather than making their hotel visible and discoverable. Logical, as you may be the recognizable face. Atmosphere, experience, and emotion are core elements in a hotel. However, you can transfer that to your colleagues, allowing you to work ON your hotel. Making a noise by working on your hotel is the way to secure more bookings. Once you adjust and undergo a transition in part of your task package, it becomes a matter of doing and persevering. The results will follow naturally, as long as you put in the right effort.
Every optimization, no matter how small or large, is an optimization.
Online advertising
Enough chit-chat and theoretical philosophy! Let's get started with the first tip. Online advertising is possible on various platforms. Consider Google Adwords, Facebook, Instagram, or even LinkedIn to target your business stays. See where your audience is and start with a small marketing budget. To make ‘small marketing budget’ concrete: consider the money you invest in your campaigns as lost, and make sure it does not hurt. This sounds serious, but start from that premise. Initially, you will have to ‘search and play’ to get the right campaign that yields the desired results. Start with, for example, 200 euros per month. Once you have a working formula and are satisfied with the campaign costs versus the returns, it’s a matter of multiplication. More costs = more returns. You will find that from that point on, it becomes a simple calculation and, based on input, you can reasonably estimate output/results.
But you say I should reduce reliance on external sales channels!
Yes and no. External channels like Booking.com do all the (thinking) work for you. Ideal, because it costs you no time and you are sure to have bookings before paying commissions. However, you have no success formula in hand and they make it impossible for you to utilize your own success data. Your own data is gold in today’s economy. Don’t let external sites dictate how many bookings you receive and what it costs you in commissions. You want to control this yourself and coordinate your marketing and campaigns.
Once you grasp a successful formula, you also have a very strong foundation for your online efforts that will guarantee to distinguish you from your competition. Online advertising is not difficult, but don’t reinvent the wheel. There are many tips and guidelines to make your online ads successful. If the foundation is not solid, it will definitely go wrong. Follow us and sign up for the best tips to boost your hotel’s online bookings and become an authority in your industry in your area.
Remarketing for your hotel for more bookings
Remarketing is inherently linked to all your online activities. It is rare for guests to book on your hotel website during their first visit. Remarketing is a methodology to attract guests back to your website after they’ve left to persuade them into making a booking. You undoubtedly recognize it, you search online for shoes, and then cannot visit a website without being bombarded with ads about shoes. You must strike while the iron is hot, this theory works and is also (much) less costly than ads like Adwords. If you ask me, remarketing is a must to reach your online market. Remind guests of their visit to your website to challenge them to convert.
Relevant, by the way, this also applies to most other tips in this article, is monitoring the traffic to your website. Not just in numbers, but also in paths taken. It’s worth your while to delve into Google Analytics. You can set up conversions and measure how many visitors (or costs) you require for a booking (in other words, what a booking costs you in the end) and via which paths they arrive at a booking so you can conclude what does or does not work.
Optimize your website
Your website is your online store. A store does not sell just because you put a great product on a shelf with a checkout system. Conversely, you will also not sell anything if you have a fantastic appearance and welcome people with champagne and a red carpet, but your store itself is a complete mess. The pathways in your store leading to the final destination (the checkout) must be perfectly in order. There are ready-made templates to ensure your guests can use your website optimally. The chances of conversion, thus of an online booking, increase significantly as a result. And here, less is more. Fantastic graphics and unique elements with slick presentation and design do not necessarily yield the desired result. On the contrary, a clean, straight-to-the-point website (which can still provide a perfect atmospheric impression of your hotel with the right images in the right places) can deliver much better results. There are fewer distractions, the logic of navigation and usage is clearer, so conversion is much more at hand. So keep it simple!
To assist hoteliers, we have an optimized hotel website module for this purpose. This is fully included in our all-in-one hotel software. The module provides you with a hotel website that is technically (SEO) sound and requires you to fill your website with content designed carefully by marketers. It is directly translated into 15 languages, refined for mobile use, and every detail is taken care of. Try it for free to experience that a powerful and well-thought-out website is the foundation for long-term online success.
Want more direct bookings? Improve guest experience
Improving your guest experience is undoubtedly already part of your business. To keep it online-oriented, it’s wise to seek experience from your guests. To learn from it, but certainly to create new outreach opportunities. The number of reviews plays a role in your positioning in search engines, for instance, illustrating the impact of reviews. But also, the persuasiveness for new visitors to your hotel can be enhanced with reviews. Independent platforms (Google, social media, or review sites) are perceived as more trustworthy than reviews on your own website, simply because you have too much influence over them. A few ideas for generating more reviews:
- Ask for a review via an automated email post-departure
- Request it personally at checkout and input it online with the guest immediately
- Place a tablet at the reception/exit asking for a review
- Combine the above with a ‘giveaway’ such as a discount on a future stay
- Provide a coupon (digital or offline) that can only be passed on to others. This way, you encourage spreading your hotel's name further.
Organically increase visitors and bookings
Blogging is typically one of those terms I usually wouldn’t approach hoteliers with. But when I tell you that it can yield free visitors? Articles – like these – can enormously increase your reach. Moreover, they remain ‘forever’ online, and the result does not stop in the short term as with ads. Working on content can also involve visuals, such as videos. Open a YouTube channel and continuously introduce your hotel by providing interesting information. Put yourself in your guests' shoes—what issues are they facing? What answers can you provide? Share your content on social media, and Google will start to favor you. If an article yields an average of five visitors per month (consistently), you can understand the effect if you publish an article every week and maintain this for two years. Certainly, organizational reach often has much to gain as it yields a ‘stacking effect.’
More tips for obtaining bookings?
Receiving more bookings starts with yourself. Consistency is the magic word here, but also try to take advantage of all the pitfalls where many entrepreneurs have fallen. You can invest as much money in Adwords as you like, but if your landing page is not correct, you’ll achieve nothing with it. The same applies to organic reach; you can share as much good content as you’d like, if you don’t link a proper opt-in (subsequent phase where you gather information such as an email address) to your article, it won’t yield any additional online bookings.
Do you want more online bookings for your hotel and receive more tips on that? Work on your success formula and prevent yourself from falling into common pitfalls. Sign up for our unique series of interesting tips to give your online hotel a boost.
