These days more and more hotels are springing up. Hotels try their best daily to fill their rooms and make more profit. Due to there are now more options when it comes to hotels, hoteliers now try their best to offer excellent customer service and satisfy their guests. Here, we listed down some of the hotel booking trends in 2019 that every hotelier should know.

Over the years there has been an increase in the number of hotels that include influencer marketing as one of their marketing strategies. When we used this strategy properly, can increase the brand awareness of the hotels and attract more guests to the hotel. But when not used properly it leads to failure and even leaves a negative reputation on the hotel. Both the big hotels and the budget hotels are using this strategy to attract more guests to their hotels. In the below section, we will discuss some of the things a hotelier should know before diving into influencer marketing.

The group sales (corporate and group booking) are usually beneficial to hotels. This is because they are heavy spenders when it comes to hotel bookings. Due to these reasons, there are a lot of competitions among hotels to attract this kind of group sales. The demand for group business has increased and if any hotel wants to attract these groups of businesses, their hotel marketing, and sales strategies must be overhauled.

When it comes to group business, there are a lot of factors to consider in place. There are usually some checklists to follow when hoteliers try to get a good deal for their group clients. Below we are going to discuss some of the hotel group sales strategies that hoteliers can use to attract corporate and group bookings.

The most important thing for hoteliers is to fill their rooms and make more profit. It is important to know that when you design a good hotel package especially during festive seasons and holidays, your task of filling your room becomes much easier.

Today’s generations are tech-savvy and can easily get bored, so your hotel packages need to be creative. The decision path taken by a traveler to book a hotel has become broad, therefore hoteliers need to become creative in their marketing and promotions.

Nowadays, it is not just enough to be listed in OTAs and other sales channels or to have an amazing website with a booking engine integrated. However, you also need to have amazing creative packages that will attract different types of guests to your hotel.

As a hotelier, if you are already running your hotel or are about to start, you should consider including promo codes in your promotion and marketing strategy. Promo codes have already proved that they can be a powerful marketing tool for hotels. If used properly and with the right marketing strategy, promo codes can help you to fill your rooms faster by convincing reluctant clients to book from you. Also, you can use promo codes to attract more direct bookings to your hotel through your websites and social media pages. Below we are going to discuss some of the importance of promo codes in promoting your hotel.

Many hoteliers benefit from free and open-source hotel booking engines. However, there are some differences between using free and open-source hotel booking engines as compared to using closed (commercial) software. In this article, we listed five comparisons between free and open-source booking engines with commercial booking engines.

Read: Booking Engine for Hotels

As a hotelier, before you even start thinking about the features of the hotel management system you want to invest in, you should first think about how the hotel management system will help your budget hotel. Time has passed when budget hotels use excels or reservation books to manage their bookings and front desk tasks.

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. 

Back in the 1970s, the first hotel property management system was introduced. However, till the present time, not all hotel has one. A survey conducted on hotel management system in 2015 discovered that:

• only 34% of hotels used special software;
• 25% of hotels still depend on paper-based format; and
• 16% of hotels had no management system at all.

Hence, it can be deduced that there are still many hotels with a non-proper management system of which do not fulfill the criteria of a modern hotel. Thanks to the new-age trends in technology that has been a blessing to the hotel industry. The revolution of technology in the front office department has empowered hotel front desk staff to be more efficient, productive, and guest-centric.

The importance of a property management system for hotels can’t be over-emphasized. A good property management system will lift a heavy load from your front desk staff and create a happy guest experience.