7 ways to improve your hotel’s online sales for 2011

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By probyte2u

  1.  Why not redesign your website to make more elegant and load much faster. To make your website much nicer revamp it using nice photos. Don’t use flash for your website design to describe about your hotel, promotions, rooms and etc. Google and other major such engine couldn’t read the page and this lowers your page ranking in them. Ensure that your website page loads fast. Just type your website url and check how long for the page to fully download. The general rule is less than 8 seconds. Add in your twitter and facebook widget in your website as well. Your guest could easily follow you.
  2. Improve your hotel’s page ranking in major such engine such as Google, Yahoo and etc. The higher you’re the better for your hotel. Submission to social bookmarking sites, free press release and to travel related website will help you to have better ranking.
  3. Use a fast, friendly and easy hotel booking engine. Look for hotel reservation software that your guest could make their room reservation in just few simple steps securely using credit card. If the system could provide instant confirmation to the guest and you it’s much better.
  4. Sign up with more online travel agents such as Expedia.com, Booking.com, Agoda.com and etc. Each OTAs’ is strong in specific market. Some helps you to get guest from Asia Pasific Region, other OTAs might be strong in European region. If you want to check to whom your competitors is working with visit travel search engine sites such engine such as wego.com , sprice.com and etc.
  5. To help distribute your room inventories easily to the OTAs that you’re working with, use channel management system such as BookingBooster.com, SiteMinder.com or Allotz.com. Just by using one interface only, you could easily distribute the rooms and prevent overbooking problem. Some of the system might have auto distribution system, it will automatically allocate rooms to the online travel agent once it’s availability is low. Before signing up with the channel management provider, check to which OTAs that they could distribute your rooms and the pricing fee.
  6. If you have lots of rooms and your occupancy rate is low, then you could consider to use Global Distribution System or GDS. By using GDS, travel agents around the world could easily book your rooms. There are more than 600,000 travel agents and it’s a huge untapped market. Like BookingBooster.com and Allotz.com, have the facility to sign up for GDS system. They will charge you one time setup fee and commission for each booking. GDS commission is much higher compared to OTAs commission, so you might want to mark up your room rates when you use GDS system
  7. Have your own official hotel’s Facebook page and be active in twitter. You could easily get in touch with guest and potential guest. Get someone to be active at the sites, updating the latest promotions and events of your hotel. Make your reservation links/ buttons prominent in the page.

Comments

Abdullah 13 months ago

Good article, something hotelier can do about to improve their hotel sales.

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