How to Plan More Effectively for the Road Ahead

30 January, 2021

'From the ashes of disaster spring the sweet roses of success'
2020 was a challenging year for most businesses, especially those in the travel and hospitality sector. As the New Year begins, hoteliers cling to the hope of a brighter future. A recent study by Booking.com, the digital travel leader, portrays a mixed picture of what may lie ahead. Their research covered more than 20,000 travelers across 28 countries and territories, including India to reveal the 'Future of Travel'.

86% of Indian travelers said that they would take more precautions due to Coronavirus and expect the travel industry to help them gear up for this new normal. Significantly, 65% of tourists wish to travel more in the future to make up for the time lost during the lockdowns. 70% of those surveyed mentioned that they would be more price-conscious when it comes to planning a future trip. Moreover, 64% indicated they would be hunting down promotions and savings; behaviors that may last for years.

Based upon these trends and our vast expertise in this sector, ResAvenue recommends a broad roadmap which our partner hotels can follow to plan and achieve efficiencies for the future.

Create Flexible Plans
Due to the dynamic nature of the pandemic, expectations and assumptions are constantly changing every day. Hence, especially when it comes to revenue and distribution, you must plan in shorter cycles of 3-6 months. Your team will then be able to adapt quickly to the latest trends and developments in the market and regulatory environment, and even realign your hotel's strategy with the most recent patterns of consumer behavior.

Prepare Checklists For Standard Procedures
Checklists are extremely useful in reducing errors, increasing efficiency and training your staff quickly. Guest safety is paramount, and so it's imperative to prepare checklists for all the protective measures you have in place at your property that may include organizing daily temperature and wellness checks of staff, providing them with masks and gloves, sanitizing surfaces, steaming clean linens and ensuring that hand sanitizers are available in each room and located at all public spaces within your premises.

Explore And Implement New Ideas
The hospitality industry has begun to ride the wave of new revenue streams. From staging cooking classes and magic shows to hosting big webinars and virtual concerts, hotels around the world are experimenting with new revenue streams as they wait for occupancy levels to peak once again. It's the perfect time time to experiment with such novel ideas by leveraging your hotel's assets and resources to earn incremental revenue.

Develop New Pricing Strategies
Hoteliers must conduct an audit of all their existing rate plans and offers, and align them with the current market situation. As per our research, in most cases when hotels have reduced their rates to attract more guests during disasters, they found it difficult to raise them back to pre-disaster levels resulting in unsustainability in the long run. At ResAvenue, we advise you to maintain a balanced approach while devising new pricing and revenue management strategies. We also recommend revisiting and modifying your various policies for rates, cancellation and rebooking to win consumer confidence. You can offer new discounts that would capture existing demand better. Moreover, your discount strategy must encourage your guests to stay longer at your property.

Widen Your Customer Reach
You can extend your target audience to cover regional tourists, domestic business travelers and locals by offering them suitable discounts and promotions. You can develop your promotional strategy to reach out to new market segments through offers such as lower rates for locals, weekend getaway discounts, free or discounted parking, outdoor packages, and special rates for Covid Warriors viz. healthcare professionals.

Focus On Upgrading Your Platform
Your planning efforts must specially focus on updating and enhancing your booking and distribution facilities to serve your customers better. You must invest optimally in technology to improve the efficiency of your operations. With our rich expertise as a leading hospitality solutions provider, ResAvenue can help you in upgrading systems and enhancing productivity substantially. Our range of best-in-class solutions can assist you in gaining momentum for your business once the worst is behind you. We also offer an advanced channel manager to manage your online distribution easily and effectively.

Revamp Your Hotel Website
Hoteliers must ensure that their brand website is mobile-friendly, rich in content and optimized for search engines. With an integrated booking engine on your hotel website, your direct channel will be transformed into a powerful real-time sales engine. The ResAvenue team can work with you to build a fully customized responsive website, which is not only beautiful but designed to drive conversions of your web visitors into bookers.

Devise Guest Communication Plans
Hoteliers must update their guests regularly on the latest features, property enhancements, modified rates, promotional offers, health and safety measures, policy changes, new distribution channels, local travel restrictions and other key information. You need to have clear plans and checklists in place for this communication. Clearly assign these tasks to your employees after choosing the appropriate communication channels, including your hotel website, call center, email, online chat and social media networks.

Keep a close track of your progress on the road to recovery and take remedial measures whenever necessary.

ResAvenue will be there with you every step of the way, guiding you in the right direction, and helping you in achieving your stated objectives and goals in the most effective way.