5 Steps to Drive Direct Business
A question regularly asked by marketers, hotel owners, and operators is: “How can I reduce my dependency on online travel agencies and drive more direct bookings?”
Fortunately this process is heavily researched and well understood. Take a leaf from major OTA’s books and apply lessons learnt to your own direct online presence.
In this blog post we provide five tips to help you shift away from OTAs and drive more direct business to your hotel:
1. Create Compelling Content with a Hint of Urgency
In the digital world, website copy ought to be your best salesperson. It should convince guests that your hotel is the right choice for their holiday, and that your website is the best place to book their stay. Relevancy is key – your website copy exists to answer all their questions, simultaneously driving them towards a booking. Consult the staff at the front desk for the most frequently asked questions, and then look to answer these through the website content. What’s more, urgency in your copy is a valuable tool for encouraging guests to get off the fence, make a decision, and book their stay immediately. For example, “Only 2 rooms remaining for these dates!”
2. Update your Images
There is a dead-simple reason sites like TripAdvisor and Booking.com are investing so much energy and effort into curating images these days: They drive bookings. As RockCheetah founder Robert Cole noted in a recent e-book: “the one universal truth is ‘pretty pictures sell hotels.”
Larger, bolder and more engaging imagery on websites, that is regularly updated, reveals fantastic results in the hospitality industry. Images not only answer your guests’ questions quickly and easily, but also help them envision exactly how much they’ll enjoy their stay.
3. Put your Database to Work
Guest acquisition can be an expensive process. Combat these consistently rising costs by reaching and recapturing your own past guests. Data provides excellent insights into guest behaviour as well as offering you a sturdy firewall again big OTAs. After all, stay data is far more useful in understanding your guests’ needs than just booking information. An inexpensive and effective way to attract and retain guests is email. Consider sending off special offers to your past guests in period of low occupancy, or set up an informative email newsletter that is sent out every month.
4. Improve Your Support for Mobile Browsing and Booking
Mobile’s kind of a big deal now. Maybe you’ve heard. Keep up with the times by working with your web developers and booking engine partners to improve the mobile experience for guests booking through directly your website. Review the way content is shown on mobile phones and tablets, and then take steps to ensure ease of use and general readability. On a more basic level, make sure your phone number appears prominently on each page for guests who wish to call you immediately, rather than wade through the website copy. All in all, simply focus on making it easy for guests to research and book your hotel on their phones, and then don’t be surprised when they do just that.
5. Test and Learn. And Test and Learn.
One of the many reasons OTAs have captured the hearts and minds of travel bookers is their passionate commitment to testing. Learn from this process and measure each change you make to see whether it outperforms current efforts, then repeat the process again and again to continually improve on positive results. There are many tools out there that allow you to conduct A/B tests easily and in an inexpensive manner – you merely need to put them to work.
Driving direct bookings is an ongoing process. You must constantly work to improve your copy and images, utilise your data to provide targeted messages to particular guest segments, ensure those guests can browse and book through your hotel website regardless of their device using, test your assumptions and build on the results.
While it may seem like a lot to take in, the alternative is continuing to pay more for guests whose loyalty lies with a specific booking channel, or alternatively, with guests with no loyalty at all.
To find out more about driving direct bookings, or to find out more about hiring your very own revenue manager, simply contact Hotel Revenue Management on +27 (0) 744 90 77 11 or jaco@hotel-revenue-manager.com.
