The internet completely revolutionised the travel and tourism industry, displacing high street travel agents and forever changing the way people interact with direct hotel booking and flight booking.
But some hotel operators have become overly reliant on online travel agents and have dialled back their investment in marketing and sales. This has given them less control over occupancy and increased the commission’s costs which affect the profitability of the hotels.
However, over the past few years, marketing methods have evolved to a point where hotels can start to take greater control over their business development, enabling them to achieve maximum occupancy without paying high commissions.
Marketing techniques to increase direct hotel booking
These days, digital marketing channels are a vitally important part of promoting your business.
- SEO / Content Marketing – By writing relevant content on your website or blog and doing appropriate search engine optimisation (SEO), you can ensure that your hotel appears near the top of the search results for your target keywords. This will ensure that your hotel gets visibility, but it also gives you a really good chance to share the personality of your hotel.
- Email marketing campaigns – Email is a great way to stay in touch with previous guests, letting them know about upcoming promotions and inviting them back for another stay. By understanding customers’ likes and preferences, you can even target them with promotions specifically tailored to their demographic.
- Social media – The benefits of social media and threefold:
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- You have the opportunity to talk directly to your customer base, sharing pictures and comments and responding to their queries in a visible and transparent way.
- You, guests, can share their experiences with their friends and family, becoming advocates for your brand
- You can use social media advertising to serve ads to your specific target audience.
All of this starts with understanding your market and your unique place in it. With your typical online travel agent, your hotel will simply be listed alongside many others and ranked most likely on price or proximity.
When you take control of your own marketing messages, you can focus a lot more on how you want your brand to come across and who you want to speak to. Having a clear vision of your ideal customer in mind will help you to tailor your communications to them, which will, in turn, improve your click through, conversion rates and direct hotel bookings!
Targeting a relevant niche is also far more cost-effective than looking broadly at anyone in need of a hotel stay.
Finding a Partner to Help your Hotel Thrive
At AsOne, we specialise in building holistic digital business development strategies to help businesses thrive. While we have worked with many brands in the travel industry and understand the nuances of this space, we also have experience working with clients across many different industries and can bring innovative fresh ideas to help your business grow.
We look to partner with our clients over the long-term, getting to know the ins and outs of how they operate and what they aspire to, this makes us uniquely placed to design marketing solutions that exactly match our clients’ goals.
If you’d like more information on how we can help you increase direct hotel booking, don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll arrange a time to talk you through the various options.
