How Hotels Can Address The Problems Of The OTAs With Technology
There are many innovations for hotels to serve effectively to their customers. Apart from the benefits, hoteliers are also facing some problems with the OTA.
It’s not surprising then, that hotels often choose to be listed on OTAs. Thanks to the business they can achieve this via OTA.
However, there are some downsides and challenges to being listed on an OTA. Such as paying high commission fees and having to manage your inventory across multiple sites.
Now, however, many innovations make it easier for hotels to solve these obstacles and can benefit you.
Know About Problems with the OTA
There are a few challenges that any hotelier faces after listing themselves in the OTA.
Avoid High Commissions
One of the major inconveniences of using OTAs is that they charge a relatively high rate of commission. Many of the major portals take between 15 and 25 percent commission on any reservation made using their platform.
This can leave hotels with less profit per booking and frustrated.
Thankfully, however, it has never been easier to put the marketing budget into your website. When you consider that getting a direct booking engine could be a big financial benefit for your hotel,
You can use some of that extra money to spend on direct marketing to get customers to your site.
Customers prefer OTA sites to yours
Of course, if your hotel is going to begin putting a focus on direct marketing and getting more bookings from your website.
It is important to remember that it is not only the marketing technology tools that you are going to need.
It is also important to put plenty of time and budget into the development of a great website.
If your website is significantly slower or harder to use than OTA sites then you can lose customers to them.
Make sure that you are putting a budget into improving website technology, including dedicated servers that will allow your site to load faster and provide a better user experience to potential customers.
Responsive
It should also be noted here that some hotel websites may look good and be very functional on a desktop. The same level of attention is not always paid to the mobile version of the site.
This can be a real problem, as customers may like to browse your site on multiple different devices. So try to make your hotel website responsive in nature. It should work friendly for all devices.
It’s a good idea to make sure that your site is just as user-friendly for potential customers using mobiles. As this can make a big difference to your ability to make a sale directly through your website.
Manual effort and errors
Many hotels assume that when they invest in a strong website and put in the marketing budget, the rest of the process of managing bookings simply falls into place – but this doesn’t have to be the case.
Don’t forget that you will need to closely monitor and manage the availability of your hotel. As well as stay in control of the prices to ensure rooms are sold at the correct rate. Not only for your site but across any OTAs that your hotel is available on.
This is why it can be great to start using a channel manager.
This software means that you won’t have to spend countless man-hours manually updating the details and then checking for any errors that have been made.
Your inventory will be automatically synchronized with online marketplaces.
This means that you only ever have to update your availability and prices in one place, rather than having to do it individually on every site.
Tough Customer Data Analysis
It is so vital for hotels and anyone in the hospitality industry to provide fantastic customer support and service. Both in booking and throughout the stay.
It can be extremely valuable to be able to reach out to your guests before their stay to provide them with a better experience at your property.
However, many OTAs do not provide customer data and, worse, many hotels are not equipped to store all of the data.
One of the best ways to overcome the issue of data storage is to invest in cloud technology
Cloud servers can make it easy for you to store customer data in an easily retrievable form. This data can then be used to enhance the stay of each guest
Conclusion
It is very vital for the hotel industry to sketch an outline for dealing with the shortcomings of OTA. Making a plan and its proper implementation is also very essential.
Here with the OTA hotelier can enhance booking and increase their customer base. For increasing the positive review on the website and the pricing the hotelier should have a pricing strategy.
Therefore, based on the discussion above, it can be said that technology can assist hotels in solving various problems.
Overall, all the given above are the methods to overcome problems with the OTA.
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