"PromoCards - Help Hotels CATCH MORE CUSTOMERS by BOOKING DIRECT TROUGH THEIR WEBSITE"
Many hotels have been spending vast sums of money on Hotel Booking Websites, like Expedia.com - Last Minute.com - Hotels.com - Booking.com and hundreds of others. Hotels allocate a certain amount of rooms to them and rely on them to keep them full. They have to pay on average between 15% - 20% of sales to these booking agents, which is a large amount off their bottom line.
Hoteliers are now inserting their own online booking engines onto their websites. This is to encourage potential guests landing on their website to book directly with the hotel. They make it look as close as possible like the engines that booking agents’ websites use. So potential guests landing on the hotel website can instantly see availability and can instantly book and pay for a room, just like on all the other hotel booking agency websites.
These Hoteliers are now clearly seeing the greater need to Search Engine Optimise (SEO) their website and to use things like to use Google ad-words to increase their direct bookings.
The more visitors they can attract to “look and book direct” on their website, the less rooms they will need to allocate to hotel booking agents. As they get more direct bookings it starts to reduce the huge commissions that they are trapped into having to pay the booking agents to keep them full.
A lot of the larger groups or franchises have done away with using these online booking agencies all together.
The Marketing Blind Spot
A trick a lot of hotels are missing is a Marketing Blind Spot that a lot of businesses miss out on. It is that of not more fully promoting and encouraging their existing guests, who may have booked though these through other on- line booking agents, to next time, re-book directly through the hotel website.
To the rescue comes PromoCards to which a few hotels have latched on to. They are a credit card sized Mini Brochure that a few hoteliers have been using for years as a key card, whether they have electronic key cards or not. They normally contain a bit of hotel logistics, a map and highlight the hotel facilities.
The most important thing is their size because guests can conveniently keep them in their wallet or purse and tend to take them away, normally putting them with their business cards when they get home.
They are kept for future reference and referred to when returning or recommending a friend. They never stop working and become even more valuable if included in it is an incentive to book directly on the hotel website next time. (example below).
Hoteliers are spending fortunes on getting out there and looking for more direct bookings. Like a many of us they miss out on not fully using and optimising their most valuable treasure, which is usually right under our feet.
In the case of the hoteliers, as in most businesses, it is their existing happy clients that they already have. That already love them and promote them as best they can. This is the very reason why businesses go to such extremes to provide such a great service is in the first place.
Many Hoteliers aren’t aware and are not realising, that for next to nothing compared to funds already being allocated to promote direct bookings, they can actually help these existing fans to be more effective and successful at doing what they are anyway doing. That is to return and recommend others, but now also to book directly through the hotel website.
These fans are the hotel’s best advocates their best sales force – PromoCards just help to them be a little more effective.
How much more effective could a recommendation be if accompanied by a PromoCard?
Even if is 5% work out the implications – surely a no brainer!
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