Many new options are available for the future of the hotel, and we should carefully consider which ones can be helpful to us in our market segment. We’re not just talking about service options within our own establishment, but also many external possibilities , such as promotional campaigns or the services of certain booking portals. We’ll be discussing precisely this last point today.
Nowadays, booking portals play a crucial role in many aspects of what happens at our hotel. For this reason , we should pay attention to our relationship with these companies. There are many advantages to working with portals like booking.com , Expedia, Opodo, etc. However , there are also some disadvantages that need to be analyzed. We will now present these with the aim of helping you find the best option for you.
The first advantage of partnering with a booking portal is very simple: booking numbers will increase. This always sounds good, and if there are many bookings, it’s even better. However, we shouldn’t forget that our goal should be to generate as many bookings as possible through direct sales channels . Therefore, we shouldn’t focus solely on sales through booking portals, but also on developing and strengthening our own booking system .
Nevertheless, there’s one thing we shouldn’t lose sight of: If we want guests to book directly on our website, they first need to know who we are. This is exactly where the second advantage of booking portals comes into play: visibility.
With a much larger budget for marketing than hotels and resorts, booking portals have a wide range of options both online (search engines, forums, social media) and offline (TV, print media, etc.). To us, this feels like a David versus Goliath situation. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t give up on the St…äSome portals accept and yet use them to our advantage. We mü…increase the visibility of our hotelöhen. If 70% of all bookings are made through booking portals, our task is to direct potential guests from those sites to our own website. This will result in more bookings being made directly through us and fewer through the portals.
So how much does it cost to list your property on a booking portal? This offers tangible benefits, but also huge drawbacks if we go about it the wrong way.
Booking portals do not charge fees for adding us to their customer database. So the main advantage for us, first and foremost, is free marketing. If we do it right, guests will discover us through these booking portals but ultimately book through our website. In this exact scenario, we’ll create the ideal situation: the booking portal will work for us, not the other way around. If we don’t manage to do this, the biggest drawback comes into play: the commissions.
The fees depend on the booking portal, the specific service, and the additional paid services we can book there. (We can purchase more visibility, better placements, etc.) Regardless of the exact percentages, we will always lose money, so we’ll have to try to keep these paid services to a minimum.
As a result, the costs associated with our business relationship with the portal will remain variable.
So far, we’ve seen that the three main benefits are gaining visibility, the opportunity to increase booking numbers, and free marketing.
What else can we say about this type of business? Generally speaking, upon closer examination, we’ll find that there are more disadvantages than advantages for our hotel/resort:
– It would be really difficult to get into some kind of price war with the portals. So we’ll have to rule out certain options (certain marketing campaigns).
– There’s very little that sets us apart. We’re just one of a thousand other hotels, so it’s hard to stand out among the many competitors. (It’s important to use high-quality photos and content to convince people to choose us.)
A booking portal works for itself and not for the hotels/resorts. If we don’t provide the correct available booking data, the portal will, in some cases, display different data or even show available rooms in other hotels. Is that what we want?
Finally , the most dangerous problem: dependency . A booking portal will deliver better results than our direct sales channel. Therefore, no longer focusing on our own booking system is the most dangerous thing we can do. Being dependent on a third party means that every change made by that company affects our own, and we lose control.
With this in mind, we can conclude that it is necessary to work with booking portals, since they allow us to Visibility, free marketing, and even bookings. (It’s always better to show up there than not to be seen at all.) Nevertheless, we must at this Work to minimize its impact. To achieve this, we need to consider many factors. Here are two of many examples: “organic positioning”—which means ensuring our website works well on mobile devices (these days, more and more bookings are made via smartphones)—and publishing high-quality content. As a result, we won’t end up spending our money on portals; instead, we’ll invest it there and use it to our advantage. If we succeed in this, we’ll have taken a major step toward achieving our short- and long-term business goals.
RatschläHotel Management
