Six Tips to Drive Direct Bookings on your Hotel's Website

22 June, 2021

Achieving a large number of direct bookings has always been a challenging and equally rewarding task for any hotelier. In fact, one of the reasons why a hotelier may compellingly look forward to increase his Direct Bookings is to minimize the costs of OTA commission which could be as high as 15% to 30% of the gross sales value. Getting the maximum of Direct Bookings will go a long way in enhancing your revenue as you harness the full potential of your hotel booking engine.

Here are six tips that can help maximize your hotel's Direct Bookings:

Optimize your Website
Making your website visually appealing and user-friendly is one of the most essential pre-requisites for building a strong brand visibility. This attracts maximum number of visitors whom you can convert into customers successfully. The ResAvenue team can work with you to build a fully customized responsive website, which is not only beautiful but designed to drive Direct Bookings. Hotels without a mobile website tend to miss out on a large number of potential guests as millions of customers are nowadays booking rooms and services via mobile devices.

Incorporate Guest Reviews
A traveler's booking decision is largely influenced by the hotel's guest reviews. It is therefore critically important to strategically place and promote positive guest reviews on your website as well as on other popular platforms. ResAvenue offers a comprehensive Review Management solution which helps you easily utilize your customer's experience, present it to potential hotel bookers, and promote your hospitality business.

Avail Metasearch Engines
Travelers from across the globe use Metasearch engines to locate a suitable accommodation and find the best deal through price comparison. Browsing the search engine leads the traveler to the hotelier's website and this often results in higher Direct Bookings. ResAvenue offers connectivity to Metasearch sites such as Google Finder and TripAdvisor where your hotel website and rates are advertised.

Enable Social Media Bookings
You can enable Direct Bookings through Social networks such as Facebook, etc. This can be done by integrating a hotel booking engine with your brand's social media page. Millions of social media users will thus be able to book directly from the social platform. ResAvenue offers a comprehensive booking engine which can be integrated without any hassles to fetch innumerable Direct Bookings.

Offer Discounts & Promotions
Create more value for your business and get greater revenue through enticing discounts and promotional offers which can be made available on your booking engine itself. For instance, you can offer a flat discount of 15% on every room booking for a particular period or a free dinner for 2 persons for 'early bird' customers. From simple discounts for a defined period to long stays, early or last minute bookings, value added stay enrichments; ResAvenue makes it all possible. You can now offer promotions that your guests just cannot resist!

Adopt Guest Management Strategies
A powerful guest management strategy focuses strongly on the requirement of guests including the return guests who tend to be more profitable for your business. This not only gives your guest a positive experience but also motivates him to return to your hotel through Direct Bookings. ResAvenue has developed an advanced guest management system that enables you to target your walk-in customers, direct web bookers, as well as your hotels' OTA customers. You can now offer differential pricing and promotions to your regular guests in order to boost customer retention, improve ratings and drive your hotel's direct bookings like never before!

Building the credibility of your brand is easy through direct bookings. This may require some initiative from you at the start but the results are well worth the effort. The six tips mentioned above can help you gain better traction in terms of achieving Direct Bookings and simultaneously generate ample revenue opportunities for your hotel.