With the advent of technology and the need for easily accessible services, a surprisingly large number of hotels rely on online travel agents (OTAs) to reach guests. OTAs can help your hotel reach a wider audience and market your property to people who would otherwise be unable to find it. However, OTAs can have quite a few limitations.
Hotels that invest in OTAs to do all their heavy lifting can face numerous problems with customer relations, loyalty, revenue, and brand image. To avoid such shortcomings, there is a need to create an online hotel booking management system that would allow people to book rooms directly through the hotel’s website.
How Do OTAs Affect Your Hotel’s Revenue?
When your guests book rooms through OTAs, a percentage of the revenue from those reservations are taken by the OTA sites as commission. In some cases, it can even be as high as 20%. It may almost feel like you are competing with these OTAs for your own business and, in most cases, that is exactly what you’re doing. This is, in terms of each booking, and it causes a considerable strain on businesses.
Consider just how much money you could be losing annually if all your bookings are made solely on these third-party sites. A loss at such a high percentage is a major concern for any hotel, especially for independent and small-scale operators.
An efficient way to build a robust direct-booking engine would be using hotel online booking engines. And this is where Hotelogix property management system comes into the picture; it offers a hotel booking engine that can be configured into the hotel’s website as well as your hotel’s Facebook page.
How You Can Increase Loyalty And Build Direct Relationships
When people rely on third-party sites to make their hotel bookings, they become loyal to that site rather than to your hotel. There is a disconnect between the customer and your hotel. If you are unable to build a relationship with your customers, it becomes difficult to find returning patrons.
By configuring a direct-booking engine on your website, you can create a strong customer connect to help guarantee brand loyalty. When customers decide to book rooms through your site, they also know more about your hotel. You own your narrative and decide on what sort of brand image you want to portray.
Customers can also explore more options, deals, and promos through your site. When they have a good experience in your hotel, they will tell more people about you — their friends, family, coworkers. They will most likely look up the hotel website for future reservations rather than go to some OTA.
With a quality booking software, you can also gain some valuable information about your guests. You will be able to ascertain if they are return guests, for example. You can send them an email when you run specials or even wish them well on their birthday. You might even want to provide a special rate if they book again during their birthday month through a loyalty rewards program. Even if you were to make an offer of a free meal or a discount of 10% on their next stay, you will make more than you would have through the OTA. Additionally, you will also continue to increase your loyalty with the customer. Brand loyalty makes guests more likely to book through your site and stay at your hotel during their next trip.
Using a property management software such as Hotelogix allows you to automate this entire process.
Why You Should Use The Hotelogix Web Booking Engine
Hotelogix provides an easy and affordable solution to add a quality direct-booking engine to your hotel website. This software can provide users with a wide range of benefits to help manage the hotel at every single level that includes direct bookings. With Hotelogix, it is possible to increase the number of hotel direct bookings, which can, in turn, increase your revenue.
Having a user-friendly website that includes an easy-to-navigate, proper CTAs, and pop-ups and a good online hotel booking management system will help increase reservations.
Talking about Hotelogix web booking engine, one of the best features of the booking engine is that it is very simple to integrate with your website. The integration of the web booking engine makes it very easy for the visitor to start their booking process with just a single click. You can also run marketing campaigns from your website and various social media accounts that offer special rates for your followers. This provides more incentive for the visitors to follow and make reservations directly on your hotel’s website rather than going through an OTA.
Most businesses have a strong social media presence. And such business must have consistent and quality content as it helps increase followers. But is there a way to allow your followers to book directly with you?
With Hotelogix, the answer is an absolute ‘Yes’! Hotelogix software even allows for the integration of the booking engine into your Facebook account. Your Facebook followers can now book their stay through the hotels Facebook page. This helps to make the booking process efficient and guest friendly.
While an online booking engine will help you make a room booking from your website super easy. It is equally important that you have competitive rates when compared to the rates that are being promised on the OTAs. After all, travellers want to save money wherever they can, and will look for the best offers. Creating the right promotions and packages for your guests will help improve loyalty with your guests.
With Hotelogix software, you can generate reports that show which of your bookings are coming from other sources. This data is crucial in managing your marketing campaigns, and it can help you determine the areas that need attention within your website moving forward.
A major advantage that Hotelogix offers is its integration of Review Express. Review Express is an automated solution that enables the simple and effortless collection of reviews from guests which can be viewed on the Frontdesk module of the software. From there you will be able to respond to the comments and make changes to the services provided based on the guest reviews.
There are many advantages to using Hotelogix software. It can dramatically change and improve how your hotel operates and the number of booking requests that your hotel receives. It is difficult to find efficient and affordable hotel property management systems online booking engines. Hotelogix is a one-stop solution to increase website booking and reduce your dependency on OTAs.
Hotelogix Helps Manage OTAs As Well
OTAs play their part in connecting travellers and hotels, globally. They contribute by marketing your brand to a larger audience. However, relying solely on OTAs to manage your bookings can put a huge strain on business. This can be countered by creating your own web booking engine. This is where Hotelogix excels.
Hotelogix web booking engine helps you not only make your own reservations and reduce your dependency on OTAs, but it also helps you bring in more guest bookings through your Facebook page. Integrating a fast and efficient online booking engine with your hotel website can prove to be very advantageous. Hotelogix provides the best solution for all your needs.
