Nowadays, most hotels have their hotel website and social media pages, allowing the installation of booking engines in these hotel websites and social media pages. These have given hoteliers more confidence to promote and market their hotels to their guests while offering them some incentives in the process to convince them to book directly from their website. Although there are advantages of occupying your rooms vacancies through online travel agents (OTAs), there are also benefits of direct booking. Below we list some of the benefits of hotel direct bookings.
Read: What Should A Good Hotel Website Have?
Hotels Can Increase Their Profits by Doing Away with OTAs Commission Fees
Some of the hotels don’t integrate a booking engine on their website and social media but rather depend fully on online travel agents (OTAs) to fill their empty rooms and make a profit. When this happens, hoteliers pay some commissions to these OTAs for their services. However, when hoteliers integrate booking systems on their website and social media pages and encourage their guests to book directly from their website, they can save more money and increase their revenue because they won’t be paying OTAs commissions anymore.
Read: How to Optimize OTA to Improve Hotel Direct Booking?
Room Rates Can Be Controlled Better
It will be generally easy for hotels to control their room rates when they don’t have many OTAs to deal with. As a hotelier, you can play around with your room rates and pricing strategy. For example, you can offer some discount on your room rates to your direct booking guests.
Customer Experience Can Be Better Managed
When your guests book your rooms directly it is left for you and your hotel staff to make sure they have a wonderful experience starting from your booking site to your hotel premises. These responsibilities are no longer left for the OTAs or other sales channels to handle. Also, when guests book directly from you they will usually leave feedback and reviews about their experience. With these reviews, you can better manage your guest experience.
Direct Booking Customers Can Be Given Incentives
Commissions saved by hoteliers from OTAs can be given to the guest as an incentive and this will encourage more direct bookings and also result in loyal guests. Various incentives can be offered to a guest that will make them more interested in booking directly from your hotel website and social media pages. These incentives can be in the form of a free spa and massage session, a free room upgrade, etc. As a hotelier, you have the power to offer these incentives to your guests while OTAs don’t. And these incentives which are a result of the direct booking will surely increase your hotel revenues.
Conclusion
In conclusion, when you encourage direct bookings from your website, you are able to provide your guests with a visual tour of your hotel via your hotel website. Since you have control over your website you can upload your hotel room and facilities videos and images for your guest to view. Also, direct booking eliminates the possibilities of foul play and manipulations from sales channels, especially during peak seasons.
