Direct bookings for hotels are expected to make up at least 50% of all online bookings by the end of this year. That’s a major shift from the status quo of recent times, with online travel agents (OTAs) taking a much larger share of bookings over the last decade or more.
This change is being welcomed by hoteliers, who don’t want to be over-reliant on OTAs. And there are plenty of additional rewards to hotels who get direct bookings. No commission fees, and the opportunity to build a loyal customer base are two of the most compelling ones.
But how do you ensure your hotel gets a lucrative proportion of direct bookings, amid a crowded and noisy online where every hotel is vying for attention?
Deeply understand your audience
Before you hone in on promoting your hotel far and wide, you need to know your audience inside-out. Market research and defining your audience isn’t a one-time activity. You need to continually revisit your audience data to understand their likes, dislikes, habits and more. Remember that your guests are people – and people evolve.
Dig into your guest data using your property management system (SIHOT.PMS can help you with this) and look at any trends or patterns in the types of guests who are enjoying your hotel.
Look at whether they’re solo travellers, couples, families, multigenerational groups, or business travellers. But also interrogate what makes them tick. This could be anything from whether they ate in your restaurant most nights, if they accessed the spa at least once, or if they worked with the concierge to plan activities? This kind of information will help you understand how to market your hotel to more guests like this.
Optimise your digital assets
Before you start attracting more traffic to your hotel website, you need it to absolutely shine. Check the layout of every single page, make sure there’s a clear call to action and easy navigation, and use engaging images.
Check your site on mobile devices too and optimise the mobile experience, as 40% of travellers used a mobile device to book hotels in 2023. This number is only rising. Make sure you add metadata to every page and image too, as this is a key step in search engine optimisation (SEO) and getting traffic to your website from search engines.
Have a metasearch strategy
Although a combination of SEO and advertising is important for hotels to gain direct bookings, metasearch is a critical piece of the puzzle. Metasearch engines are advertising options that aggregate results from different search engines. The fact there are specific metasearch engines for the hospitality sector (such as Google Hotels, Trivago and Kayak) means that you can be much more focused and targeted with a metasearch strategy. Your hotel will appear in results alongside some of the big player OTAs, giving the direct booking option more visibility to your prospective guests.
Travellers use metasearch sites to easily compare rates and options. If you keep your hotel’s rate competitive, you’ve got a good chance of securing the booking, and an opportunity to convert guests into loyal customers. SIHOT has an integration with Mirai Metasearch, enabling users to distribute their inventory and hotel rates directly to all the main metasearch engines.
Invest in your booking engine
Driving more traffic to your website won’t lead to conversions if your booking engine isn’t easy to use. As hotels have relied on OTAs more in the past, they haven’t always invested in their own booking technology. It’s time for this to change if you’re serious about getting more direct bookings.
Data shows that 80% of hotel bookings are abandoned before a prospective guest completes the transaction – so don’t let problems with your booking engine be a reason for this.
Solutions such as SIHOT.WEB integrate with the PMS and offer a one-page-booking function, making it easy and intuitive for users to make a booking. Technological interventions like these will ensure that more of your hard-won website traffic will convert into actual customers – and hopefully loyal ones too.
Contact us to find out more about how the SIHOT hotel management system could improve the operations of your hotel.