6 tips to make your photos sell rooms

Sep 24, 2018 | Hotelier Academy, OTAs

6 tips to make your photos sell rooms

Check out our 6 easy tricks on how to use room images to your full advantage.

Good room photos give your bookings a leg up.Along with prices, images are the first thing visitors who book online look at. You should, therefore, make sure each room type offered through your booking engine is not only clearly described but also illustrated by several high-quality photos of different parts of the room.

Get the most from your images: a good selection of attractive, high-quality pictures will promote your hotel well;
Give your guests the full picture: take photos of the room, bathroom, and a couple other angles to provide guests with a more complete visualization;
Think beyond the room: for example, if you are offering a room facing the sea, it is advisable to showcase the pictures of both the room and the sea view;
Make them feel at home: include a picture with a stack of fluffy towels, nice toiletries, and slippers;
Take them on a trip with your photos: make your potential guests imagine lounging on the bed with a glass of champagne or enjoying a bubble bath on the tube. Emotion is everything when it comes to selling;
Take them on a trip with your photos: make your potential guests imagine lounging on the bed with a glass of champagne or enjoying a bubble bath on the tube. Emotion is everything when it comes to selling;
Depict the target group of guests – especially when it comes to MICE, SPAs or hotels which organize weddings, you can add photos with people and let the guests identify themselves with the models an events on the pictures.
Remember that images play a key role in the decision to book. As we live in the age of visual culture, let the pictures do the talking!

Rate parity or differentiated pricing, the choice is yours

Sep 24, 2018 | Revenue Management, Revenue Strategy

Rate parity or differentiated pricing, the choice is yours

New rules in online distribution might be well underway, but rate parity it is still very often a contractual requirement for the hotel to do business with large OTAs. For many properties, the practice of rate parity goes beyond any binding agreement. It is part of the hotel’s strategy as it ensures a consistent price and supports the brand by adding to its rate integrity.

YieldPlanet helps hoteliers willing to maintain consistent prices for all partners, for all the various room types, dates and restrictions. By automating the entire process, YieldPlanet’s Channel Manager takes risk, cost, and effort out of online channel management – so that the hotelier can sell online in full confidence and focus on other important hotel management tasks. In addition, YieldPlanet’s Price Shopper allows verification of the hotel’s pricing over the last 30 days across up to three different OTAs. A red highlighting will alert the user to prices which may not respect rate parity.

For hotels wishing to differentiate their pricing strategy, YieldPlanet’s Channel Manager can help in ways. The mapping tables allow you to introduce formulas (plus or minus an amount or percentage of the price) which enable different prices per channel. It is also possible to display price and availability separately for each OTA, where values can be input manually.

Regardless of your price strategy, it is worth to remember that room rate is just one of the tools at your disposal to attract and satisfy guests. With this in mind, YieldPlanet designed products ready to serve different pricing structures and strategies, depending on your hotel, room products, and services.

Website photo gallery

Sep 24, 2018 | Hotelier Academy, OTAs

Website photo gallery

The website photo gallery is the hotel’s visit card. Thus it should provide visitors with the first impression of the place where they’ll be staying and what is in there for them.

As such, make sure that your gallery includes photos of:

the property: its lobby, guest rooms, the restaurants, and other amenities;
the area: hotel exterior, surroundings, views from the room(s) and eventually the local attractions;
the services: recreational areas, SPA, fitness center, concierge, etc.

You can divide your photo gallery into tabs to better target your group of clients and enhance user experience. Each of the tabs will be a thematic photo album (e.g. Weddings, Golf, Scuba Diving, etc.). Put yourself in the shoes of potential guests and group photos according to the different audiences. What do they want to see? A group of friends on a diving getaway is probably not willing to look through wedding photos, nor a couple planning their honeymoon hoping to see a few buddies swinging their golf clubs.

Once the photos are selected and grouped, you can also add a tag to your photos to improve your search engine ranking on Google!

France prohibits Rate Parity clauses by law

Sep 24, 2018 | Revenue Management

France prohibits Rate Parity clauses by law

As expected, on July 9th, the French National Assembly voted in favor of suppressing rate parity clauses in contracts between hotels and online travel agencies (OTA) and qualifying the term of contracts as a “contrat de mandat”. The law applies regardless of where the online booking platform is based and sets a fine up to 150 thousand euros for its violation.

This is the first decision at the legislative level, in Europe, that explicitly prohibits such anti-competitive clauses in these agreements, forcing hotels to not to sell their rooms at lower prices than offered in the OTAs. Unless hotel reservation platforms challenge the decision via the Constitutional Council, hoteliers in France will soon be able to offer their customers the rates they want in their own online and offline channels.

France thus follows the example of Germany who, as first, through the competition authority had banned this practice.

Start growing your mobile bookings today

Sep 24, 2018 | Hotelier Academy, Revenue Management

Start growing your mobile bookings today

With 335 million devices sold around the world during Q1 2015, smartphones are ubiquitous and their usage keeps growing. Travellers are no exception – today more than half of them book their hotel stays and flights with their smartphones. In the US alone, last year 40% of travellers switched from traditional desktop/laptop computers to mobile devices for travel-related tasks.

How can you take advantage of this trend?

First and foremost, if your hotel has its own website make sure it displays nicely on the smaller screens of smartphones and tablets. In fact, after the recent adjustment of Google’s algorithm mobile device compatibility has become a must: your site might have been on the first page of Google’s search results, if it’s not mobile friendly it will no longer be visible. Google’s decision may be controversial but it reflects the key role of mobile Internet usage.

Contact details

A website content you see on a large computer screen will most likely appear differently on a mobile device. In particular, information might be shown in a different order, so it is important to keep the most important elements „above the fold” – i.e. in the area immediately visible after the user has loaded the page. The phone number and the email address of your hotel, as well as the contact form, should be in this area. A mobile webpage can be very long so don’t make your visitors search for your contact details endlessly!

Next, if you already have w responsive, mobile-friendly website, keep in mind a few rules which might help you grow your bookings.

Booking engine

If you are using a booking engine make sure it is usable on a mobile screen. In particular, navigation elements should be large enough (make it easy for your visitor to hit the „book it” button with his/her finger). Luckily a growing number of booking engines are mobile friendly. And if you choose YieldPlanet’s Booking Engine, you will also benefit from seamless integration with your website – the booking page is just another page within your web domain, rather than a pop-up window hosted on a third-party booking domain.

How to get there…

Some of your potential guests are searching for accommodation whilst already on the road. Make it easy for them to reach your hotel, wherever they are. It is as simple as adding a Google map to your website with your hotel’s position marked – visitors of the mobile version will be able to use your coordinates to navigate and find your hotel easily.

Minimize the weight of your pages

Despite broadband access offered by most cellular networks, in many places around the world mobile Internet can still be painfully slow. This means that your web pages, when accessed via a mobile device, should be lighter than your standard pages. For example, your mobile page can use smaller and fewer pictures – you can keep just a couple of images that illustrate your property the best.

Mobile ads

If you advertise via Google Adwords remember to optimize your ads for mobile devices. This will increase the number of visits to your website. If you send email newsletters do you know that most email marketing service providers make it possible to send responsive emails, adapted to mobile devices? Simply provide an alternative design, adapted to smaller screens, to improve the results of your email campaigns.

Become a “mobile-friendly” hotelier to stay ahead of your competitors and grow your bookings today.
Sources: idc.com

Get started with wholesale distribution

Sep 24, 2018 | Connections, OTAs

Get started with wholesale distribution

It is no news that the wholesale segment has been losing out a significant share of online business to OTAs. Nevertheless, hotels should still consider wholesale companies as important providers of accommodation booking services in the travel market. In fact, for many hotels, wholesalers are not only significant but vital business partners.

It is said that distribution providers are put at the service of both consumers and hotels. On one hand, wholesalers give the global community of leisure travel buyers access to a full range of properties around the world, while on the other they offer opportunities for hotels, allowing them to access different client segments and sub-segments in any country.

Adding a wholesaler as an online sales channel broadens the hotel distribution network consisting of online travel agencies, tour operators, brokers and consolidators. Hotels gain access to new global markets and see their all-year round occupancy improved, which ultimately helps them to adjust to seasonal fluctuations.

If you are new to wholesales distribution here is a brief overview for you to get started.
The wholesaler is normally an aggregator or a bed bank, from whom Tour Operators and Travel Agents can buy. Wholesalers generally work with hotels of all sizes, from hostels and B&Bs to the industry leading chains. They usually contract with a commission that can vary between 20% and 40% (which includes the commission of the TO and travel agent), which means that the wholesaler rate will normally be the lowest.

Thanks to the integration into wholesaler’s online environment, properties using a leading channel management technology, such as YieldPlanet’s, are able to centrally and easily maintain inventory and room rates, while increasing their exposure through various distribution channels.
Learn more about how to broaden your online distribution and request the full list of wholesalers with whom we are integrated here.

Generating direct bookings with metasearch engines

Sep 24, 2018 | Revenue Management, Revenue Strategy

Generating direct bookings with metasearch engines

Nowadays, metasearch engines are a fast-growing advertising model in the travel industry. They can be an alternative channel for generating traffic and therefore represent an opportunity for hotels helping them to increase direct bookings.

Metasearch engines present a consolidated offer while providing travelers with a wide choice of properties and price transparency. The mechanism is simple with benefits for both hotels and consumers. Hotels pay advertising fees which ultimately lead to direct bookings. The traveler clicks on their chosen property and completes the transaction directly on the hotel website.

Metasearch engines search for the user’s request in other search engines and databases, aggregating then the result in a singles list. For travelers, this means easy access to real-time availability and pricing. For hotels, metasearch engines represent a key driver of traffic and direct bookings.

Metasearch engines can be an important tool to reduce their dependency from OTAs as they redirect the users to the property’s website, to complete the booking process. Generally, metasearch investment produces a very good return-on-ad-spend.

Metasearch engines, include the giants Google Hotel Finder, Trivago by Expedia, and TripAdvisor. The hotel’s goal should be to see themselves in the Google Hotel Finder metasearch pricing menus or among the top three features advertisers in the TripAdvisor meta-search menu. These metasearch functionalities, although not reaching very significant results at the moment, are constantly growing and increasing their functionalities, and could raise their role in hotel online distribution in the next few years.

Google Instant booking

Sep 24, 2018 | Revenue Management

Google Instant booking

The fast grow of metasearch engines has attracted Google to the sector. The search giant is now rising in importance in the hotel online distribution. First, Google has launched a metasearch engine for hotels, the Google Hotel Finder. Now they are testing Instant Booking, their own hotel room reservation system.

The fast growth of metasearch engines has attracted Google to the sector. The search giant is now rising in importance in the hotel online distribution. First, Google has launched a metasearch engine for hotels, the Google Hotel Finder. Now they are testing Instant Booking, their own hotel room reservation system.

Currently, travelers searching for a property with Google Hotel Finder are presented with a range of booking options. This mechanism works via price adds in which both hotels and OTAs can participate. When choosing a property, the user is being redirected respectively to the hotel website or to the OTA. In other words, the user leaves the Google interface and is taken to the bidder’s website.

With its new strategy, Google Instant Booking, thanks to metasearch engines and Google user experience, would keep the user within Google, disabling hotels and online travel agencies to complete the transactions.

The fact is that no launch has been officially announced. It is no wonder such secrecy around the topic. Being true, the launch of Google instant booking tool would represent a game changer in the online distribution.

3 tips to make the most of hotels’ partnership with OTAs

Sep 24, 2018 | Connections, OTAs

3 tips to make the most of hotels’ partnership with OTAs

OTAs are here to stay and – like it or not – there isn’t much hotels can do about it. What hotels can and should do is to strengthen their partnership with the OTAs and focus on what they do best.

It suffices to look at the great example of OTAs as far as customer service, technological development and analysis of travel consumer behaviour is concerned. As such, and in order to make the most of their relationship with OTAs hotels should:

Get and defend a high rating score

Hotels can do that by listening to customer’s feedback and continuously improve their service based on the guests’ comments. Very often, travelers consult OTAs even before the booking. They use these channel while planning their vacation and read hotel descriptions and reviews in order to select a hotel for their holidays. This is why is so important to put an extra effort here and successfully communicating hotels’ brand image on OTAs.

Post good content

A good visual content and accurate descriptions give the hotel’s bookings a leg up. It is no novelty that hotel images along with the description play a key role in the decision to book. Thus they should provide visitors with the first impression of the place where they’ll be staying and what is in there for them. Each room type should not only be clearly described but also illustrated by several high-quality photos.

Communicate availability effectively

A key area for hotels to defend their competitive position is the communication of their long-term and last minute availability. The use of a channel manager makes this job easier as the tool includes online room inventory and rate management so that hotels can easily distribute their prices and availability among all OTAs.

Catering to Russian market

Sep 24, 2018 | Connections, OTAs

Catering to Russian market

Russian travelers are increasingly booking trips abroad. Seeing as high-spending guests, each hotel should the possible and the impossible to cater to their needs. Otherwise, they’ll go and stay somewhere else.

Catering to Russian market

Invest in your Russian guests by localizing your hotel website in Russian and offering Russian-language call center and mobile apps. Additionally, you can add Russian-speaking butlers to the staff, create special menus cater to Russian tastes and offer Russian-language tour guides.

There is not a secret formula to succeed. Try to find our your way out by understanding what their needs are and how you should handle them. Then adapt your offer to this segment and eventually introduce amenities to deal specifically with the Russian segment.

One thing is sure, taking into consideration the overall spending of Russian guests, the rewards for the hotel can be sizeable.

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