If your hotel is not in order from an operational perspective or it has poor online reviews, technology cannot do wonders for you. But, if you are not getting enough sales in spite of having everything sorted, here we are giving some effective tips to boost room sales for small hotels.
1. Adapt to swiftly deal with OTAs
Online travel portals are still not given the required importance by many hotels. Previously those hotels used to deal with offline agents and it is difficult for them to adjust themselves to handle OTAs and online hotel booking. To be featured on the search results of all OTAs is an achievement for these hotels though they have to pay high commissions to OTAs. Serious buyers actively looking for a hotel in your destination directly view these search pages and therefore you must figure on all possible search results on all OTA as much as possible. OTAs have become a centre of massive online traffic as a result of the convenience they offer to customers. Therefore, they have the potential to drive hotel room sales.
2. Merely listing is not enough
If you want to boost your room sales, listing on major OTAs is not enough. It has been seen that a very small inventory of around 2 rooms is listed by most hotels. Suppose, you did not update your entire room inventory and listed only a few. Now, a family is looking for three single rooms. Therefore, no conversion will happen. Your hotel bookings will have a boost if you provide a full room and property description instead of only a partial description. The sales generated by a hotel determines the popularity of hotels and on the basis of this, all OTAs rank hotels. Therefore, generating sales and ranking higher in OTAs will be difficult if there is no clarity in the description of your property.
3. Getting and managing reviews from customers
Besides managing the hotel operations, managing review is also important. A lot of people don’t book a hotel which has no review on the site. You can invite your customers to give a review by a simple line on the back of your business card, by inviting them to review on checkout or by sending them a personalized e-mail thanking them for their visit and asking them to share their experience on the review site.
4. Flexible pricing
There should be a flexible pricing strategy for your hotel. This helps to ensure maximum occupancy and maximize revenue generation. Developing multiple price points for different target segments is important. However, tracking and managing price strategies across multiple time frames and length of stays can be a challenging task for many hotels, especially the small and independent properties. The sales of rooms including premium room can get a boost if there is a positive marketing strategy. You should invest in a channel manager integrated with a centralized reservation system.
5. Tracking online customer behaviour
Tracking customer behaviour on your website on all OTA platforms where you are visible is a way of increasing sales which often remain unnoticed. By getting familiar with Google Analytics, you can track your own website and booking engine. You can get help from a wide range of data provided by the analytics in monitoring what features of the hotel’s website interest the customers and what drives them away. It is relevant that you track the behaviour of visitors to your website, the most important online asset for the hotel because almost all hotel reservations in India are made online. You can get the results of your online marketing strategy by installing Google Analytics as it reveals the source of traffic to the site.