How hoteliers can
benefit from direct bookings

Imagine watching a game and while watching the game you realise that the weakest team has the highest chances of winning. Would you still side with the generally-winning team even though the odds clearly lie in the hands of the weakest team?

Similarly, in the context of direct bookings vs. OTA’s, although revenue sources from direct booking are highly undervalued for their revenue generation potential, realigning your approach towards optimising direct bookings should strongly suggest otherwise. Here are a couple of ways you, as a hotelier, can vantage from decreasing your reliance on OTA’s while still bringing your A-game:

Strengthening revenue from direct bookings would earn you higher margins without having to invest more while gaining more control over managing rates, inventory, and distribution. With direct bookings coming in via your booking engine, your hotel’s acquisition cost per guest would substantially go down and would generate, on average, twice an increase in booking value when compared to OTA’s.

Controlling your direct bookings helps you gain more autonomous control of your online presence; giving you leverage over third parties, including OTA’s, while keeping your guest relationship under your control. Full management of your presence on multiple channels would help in evaluating your hotel’s performance, net gain and booking engagement for each channel.

Building guest relationships through direct bookings enables you to upsell the guest, gain their loyalty, and increase their lifetime value.There is a course of action every hotelier should take to maximise the value of every guest and adjust the habits of indirect bookers during their hotel stay.

Shifting focus from evaluating historic data to pace reports is a great way to unlock hidden revenue and make informed decisions when expecting certain booking trends. Reservation rates for particular dates displayed in pace reports serve to help you anticipate demand spikes for particular days/months well in advance. Allowing you to plan your upcoming direct booking strategy for when you’d like to push direct bookings.