With the trend towards direct hotel bookings picking up with some pace, many hotels are wondering how to ramp up their direct booking strategies. Your property management system (PMS) is a critical place to start.
By 2030, it is estimated that direct digital hotel bookings will overtake online travel agencies (OTAs) as the dominant distribution channel. This is worth significant sums to hotels – more than $400 billion in global hotel gross bookings, to be exact.
The reasons hoteliers want to drive more direct bookings comes down to revenue and data. Hotels have to pay OTAs a commission for each booking, typically around 15-20%, but sometimes as much as 40%. Cutting out these commissions by gaining more direct bookings makes sense for the bottom line. In terms of data, direct bookings enable hotels to gather and retain more data about their customers. This data is particularly valuable for marketing and future revenue generation.
Although many commentators say OTAs won’t go away – and that there is a place for both OTAs and direct bookings to coexist – shifting the balance to gain more direct bookings is a solid revenue generation strategy for hotels.
So what do you need in place for a successful direct booking strategy? It starts with your PMS.
Integrated booking engine
To get more direct bookings, hotels need to make the booking process easy. OTAs invest millions into their booking technology to make it slick and seamless, so your hotel website needs a booking engine that is pain-free rather than a pain point for customers.
Integration with your PMS is the next factor that puts your hotel in the driving seat. For example, SIHOT.WEB retrieves the price and room availability from SIHOT.PMS in real-time. This enables a hotel to take bookings, consolidate customer data in one place, and ensure room allocations and inventory is managed efficiently. The combined power of your PMS and booking engine are extremely effective for enabling direct bookings.
Personalised guest journey
Having a PMS with an integrated CRM, such as SIHOT.CRM, is a key pillar of the direct booking strategy for any hotel. Home to complete customer profiles based on bookings and interactions guests have had with the hotel, the CRM can enable market segmentation to feed into marketing strategies. This is first-party data in action – as basing marketing campaigns on real customer data immediately brings a higher rate of engagement, helping to drive more direct bookings.
SIHOT.CRM also has campaign management features, enabling you to track the success of marketing campaigns. This data is all critical to feed into future marketing campaigns that are highly targeted, which is a strong strategy for improving direct booking rates into the future.
Nurturing loyalty
Ultimately, a key purpose of the data held in the PMS is to encourage loyalty. Targeting marketing campaigns to previous guests is central to driving loyalty, and can be supported by additional modules such as SIHOT.PRE- & POST-STAY. Follow-up emails sent after a guest’s stay can include offers to entice them back again, also improving the likelihood of gaining a direct booking.
Dedicated loyalty schemes is another tactic for driving direct bookings that the PMS can support. With a module such as SIHOT.LOYALTY, hotel loyalty cards can be managed, and reward and discount schemes can be integrated. Incorporating this within the PMS and CRM systems makes it straightforward for staff to administer, making rewards easy to enjoy for guests. And critically, the data held on guests can feed into targeted sales and marketing campaigns. This means guests are more likely to receive the loyalty perks that are meaningful to them based on their preferences, heightening their engagement with the hotel brand, and their likelihood to book direct in the future.
SIHOT.PMS is the foundation for your direct hotel booking strategy – contact us to find out more.