After the pandemic crisis, hotel owners now have a great challenge: to sell better in order to be more profitable. That is to say, to try to maintain or increase occupancy and, at the same time, increase the Average Daily Rate.

To achieve this, hotels must adapt their distribution plan, choosing channels with lower costs that allow for an improvement in the operating account and technological tools that help them in the process.

This is where Smart Channel Manager Distribution comes in. A series of strategies that help hotel owners to optimise revenue and improve distribution in online channels, always accompanied by powerful tools that allow you to develop these smart distribution strategies.

Maintaining an appropriate distribution mix

According to Statista, 72% of independent hotels in Europe use more than one online travel platform. This establishes a high revenue dependency on these booking portals.

Therefore, a smarter strategy is to stick to only those distribution channels that offer the most profitability.

This means that direct sales will have to become more important in order to balance the increased operational costs. So, as a hotelier you will have to choose what weight to give to each channel in distribution.

Direct Bookings vs. OTA Bookings

Online travel agencies are great allies for hotels, provided they are managed properly. They should be an important distribution channel, but not to the point where the majority of revenue depends on them.

While these platforms are often travellers’ first contact with hotels, it is not smart to bet all your chips on them.

Use them, but manage very well the positioning inventory, the rates of each platform and their commissions. With this, you will be able to evaluate if the commercial relationship is the right one for your hotel.

Direct Bookings: Highest Priority

If you know how to manage the costs of direct bookings, this should be the most profitable channel for your hotel. To make it so, here are a few tips:

• Optimise the website
• Do SEO and content marketing
• Control direct distribution costs
• Offers best rate guarantee
• Creating a customer loyalty strategy
• Educate and reward your staff

This will help to promote your hotel brand and position it in search engines, which will generate an increase in direct bookings.

Pricing Strategy

For all of the above to work, you need to keep your pricing strategies right. This means announcing rates at the right time and in the right channels. Because each market segment, type of distribution channel and amount of demand merits a different price.

If you don’t, you will be missing many opportunities.

Therefore, if you want to attract more guests, you will have to optimise your prices on every channel you advertise on. In addition, this ensures more revenue and effective distribution. It is also important to avoid common mistakes in your pricing strategy:

• Trying to sell all rooms too early
• Do not change tariffs
• Setting prices on hunches
• Reacting to your competitors’ price changes

Smart Online Distribution Strategies Ensure Better Prices

Several cases have shown that better online distribution guarantees more revenue, as it increases ADR.

This is possible by striking the right balance between each distribution channel you use. Tour operators should be the lowest revenue earner in the business, due to their high cost. Instead, direct bookings and online travel agency bookings will become more important.

In this way, you can guarantee higher profitability for your hotel and the longed-for increase in the average daily rate.

Pricing strategies have to be accompanied by systems that support you in maximising your hotel’s RevPAR, effectively managing the Yield in a fully automated way. For example, YieldPlanet’s Price Optimizer allows you to do just that, with the help of artificial intelligence. In addition, the Price Optimizer works 24/7 ensuring that the hotel can always react to any changes, regardless of when they happen – so that no opportunity to change prices or close sales is lost or delayed.

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The risk of cancelled reservations is something inevitable for every hospitality property. Some guests will always cancel the reservation for different reasons, but how hoteliers can handle it without notable damage – remains an eternal question. 

Getting the booking by another guest on very short notice is a challenging task, but not impossible. How to get a new reservation after a last-minute cancellation? And what lessons should you learn to minimise the risk of booking cancellations?

• Create a clear cancellation policy: If you provide your guests  with a deadline for cancelling, you need to make sure that conditions and dates are clear. One of the ways to do that is by making sure it’s written in the terms and conditions of the reservation so that the guest can be informed  beforehand. If you also want to have a non-refundable deposit, you need to make it clear beforehand. 
• Ask for a deposit: You can ask guests  to pay a non-refundable fee, so if the cancellation comes, you will be covered by the deposit fee. It will also make them feel more committed to the reservation. The deposit can make your guests think twice before cancelling if they don’t want to lose their money. 
• Have good communication with your clients: Having good communication is crucial. It’s important that you reply to your guests quickly and efficiently to make a good impression. It would also be thoughtful if you check on them after the reservation and before the arrival to build more trust. 
• Speak with your guests after a cancellation: If guests cancel their reservation, talk with them and try to learn why they cancel for you to improve. There may be a common problem that you can avoid. 
• Offer to reschedule: If a guest cancels because they can not come on that date for personal matters or for any kind of reasons, you can offer them to change the dates. This can help you to leave a better impression and not to lose a guest. 
• Keep your calendar updated: Keeping it updated is crucial to avoid unnecessary cancellations and double bookings. Imagine that two different guests make a reservation on the same property through different sites because it appears available on both, even though it isn’t, just because the calendar hasn’t been updated properly.
• Have a good Channel Manager: Updating the information, sending fresh availability to your channels and keeping all the data synchronised will help you to cover the cancellation damage, promote and sell cancelled rooms via another distribution channel. All of these tasks can be easily covered by Channel Manager, which is an absolutely irreplaceable tool for a modern hotelier. If you are looking for one, check how YieldPlanet’s Channel Manager can meet your needs and help you to fight unwanted cancellations. You can find more information and updates abour our Channel Manager here.

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On the first post we explained 6 steps about turning visual content into a calling card of your property to sell more because we’re in a new era of visual culture. On this second part, we’ll continue with 5 final steps:

7. Going beyond imagery with virtual reality
Hospitality customers usually require lots of information before they book a room. Property and room descriptions, customer reviews, images, and sometimes even videos – all of these need to be reviewed, in most cases, before making a final decision. Due to virtual reality, this can be significantly shortened. Nowadays many travel companies are providing virtual reality elements on websites or apps, such as a virtual walk-through. It allows users to experience a digital version of a hotel room, or even take a look at one of the nearby attractions. This immersion can enable hoteliers to offer a ‘try before you buy’ option for their guests to simplify the process of making a decision and eventually, reservation.

8. After-photoshoot tips
You did a great job! Now you have a lot of photos, start to select the best ones and get ready to have them done before publishing online. There are a lot of editing tools for laptops and smartphones that can easily polish your photos up. Using these tools, you can sharpen blurred images, make color corrections, play with the light, crop it, and much more. Remember to go easy on the filters and effects. Keep in mind that the final image should still look natural and accurate. Some of these tools are very affordable or even free, so you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg to get one. For example, Canva, Pixlr Express, PicMonkey, and GIMP can help you to apply some nice professional tricks to your photos in free plans.

9. Make sure your photos are high resolution
A grainy and blurred photo that makes the guest squint to see some details doesn’t help an image of your property. In fact, it may even damage it. Illuminate such photos from your portfolio and use only high-resolution images on your website, social media, and other platforms. Take into account that some of the social media reduces the quality of photos while uploading.

11. Encourage your guests to take photos & share 
Make your guests become your photographers! Start with creating an Instagram or Facebook account and come up with an easy unique hashtag. Ask your guests to take photos to share them on social media and tag your property name or use your hashtag. You can encourage guests to do so by offering nice benefits – discounts or free things (drinks, massages at SPA, desserts, etc). Repost or like every pic you have been tagged on to show your interest and gratitude to your guests. You can even use those photos on your website or other social media profiles and tag the photographer. Make sure that people from the photos you place on your website are ok with this.

12. Stick to OTAs and advices
OTA, or an online travel agency, is a marketplace that allows consumers to research and book travel products and services directly with the travel provider. With new tendencies continuously evolving, your multimedia content is crucial in generating engagement. To publish pictures that attract traffic, you need to follow the strict guidelines each OTA provides. Here are examples of some of the biggest players on the market and their regulations:

Expedia is an international travel platform with the purpose to bring the world within reach. On their website, Expedia claims that the right photos can encourage guests to stay at your hotel, making photography an essential part of the website. Expedia advises:

• To use room-specific views as they get up to 11% higher conversion rate
• To post horizontal photos, explaining that vertical photos are not recommended
• The photos to be above 1,000 pixels and show an eye-level view and a straight horizon line

Airbnb is an American online marketplace and has its own set of guidelines for uploading real estate-related photography. For example, Airbnb requires all the images:

• To be at least 1024 x 683 pixels and be taken in a landscape format
• To be taken in the daylight and have the light coming from the windows

Furthermore, photographers need to pay attention to the details, such as a painting hanging on the wall of the house or a tent in the forest, in order to emphasize the character and ambiance of the property.

Booking is a travel fare aggregator website headquartered in Amsterdam. At Booking, they recommend sharing at least 24 photos describing the place. The images also must have consistent quality and high resolution. There should be at least four photos of each room reflecting a view of the room from multiple corners and unique room features and facilities.

However, the most important is to make sure the information you give customers on OTAs is up-to-date and concise. A hotel channel manager is an application that enables you to manage various distribution channels from a central point of control. Using one can help you to avoid situations where you need to access each OTA individually, one by one, in order to make adjustments to things like room rates or availability. This can help to facilitate a far more dynamic pricing strategy, where you can make adjustments to prices on a single OTA, or on all OTAs at the same time, depending on what you are trying to achieve.

YieldPlanet Channel Manager is a single point of control for all your distribution channels, easily synchronized with your own PMS. Channel Manager offers revenue management functions that help hoteliers to make informed decisions to drive profits. Discover YieldPlanet’s Channel Manager and get a free demo with one of our sales team members, which will help you to choose the best option for the property.

Download a free checklist, which can help you to implement all the advice to convert your visual content into a selling machine and profit more. Discover what hints you should take into consideration to improve your visual content strategy now.

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