Once your property goes live on the GDS system 2 things will happen
- The property will become viewable and bookable on the 4 main GDS’ (Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre and Worldspan) – All the hotel content and rooms have been built and will be visible
- Your standard BAR/Rack with supplied Corp/Gov rates will become bookable as per inventory sent to GDS from PMS
GDS on its own without ‘selling’ it wont produce any sales
- The reason for this is that 85% + of all sales on GDS are made with ‘negotiated’ rates and NOT public rates
- Even though you have public rates, 90% of searches made are for ‘negotiated rates’ – this means the agency searching, are looking for their agreements with their contracted hotel partners, which have discounts off the public rate
- (why? Because they save money by getting a lower rate) 😊
How do you ‘access’ these negotiated / lower rates so that you can get bookings?
You have to create:
- A Corporate agreement which is between hotel and agent – it contains info about the ‘deal’ (also known as the negotiated rate – which is lower than public Bar rate).
- Once the deal is signed, you need to create the actual rate on the GDS that the agents can see and book. You need info about the rate itself.
How do you get the rates, to load into a corporate agreement?
- Look at your current guest history and identify all the corporate guests and/or bookings that came via a travel agent
- Contact them, introduce them to your GDS codes, and ask them if they are open to discussing a ‘corporate agreement’?
- ‘Contact’ is by means of phone call, face to face visit, or email
- Look at all the companies in the vicinity of the hotel, contact them and ask if they have regular travelling requirements and offer a corporate agreement
- Sign up to a RFP tool like Lanyon or Cvent (last resort as its up to $800 per year and not suitable for every GDS hotel)
All help from the property will ultimately attribute to the success of being on the GDS.
Kindly contact us if you need more info on this!
Your Revenue Team 🙂