Hoteliers Learn How to Ensure Their Online Channel Management Efforts Pay Off Right

Whether it’s manually updating your room availability on Meta’s tourism engines, answering countless emails to potential clients looking to book a room with you, or the problem of overbooking. Channel management in hospitality brings with it a space of challenges. However, addressing these areas well on a daily basis is necessary for hotels to stay ahead of the competition.

With the unstoppable advancement of technology, Revenue Managers have a great opportunity to not only manage many of these relevant domains, but also save costs and generate more revenue.

In the past too, we have discussed common challenges in channel management. In this article, we will describe in more detail some uncommon and mostly overlooked aspects related to channel management in the hospitality industry. These areas may not affect your distribution directly, but they certainly impact your channel management indirectly.

If these are taken care of, inventory distribution will be a smoother and more effective task as well.

Rate Parity

Rate parity is a very difficult area in hospitality and requires keeping rates consistent across different distribution channels such as brand website, OTAs, etc. Hotels often claim the ‘best rate guarantee’ on their website so their customers can feel confident that they don’t need to look elsewhere for a better rate.

The problem here, however, is that no website can claim to offer the lowest possible rate, regardless of how many hotels advertise the “best rate guarantee” on their own websites. Customers are sure to find another website with a better rate. This generates frustration and lack of satisfaction and confidence in the hotel among customers.

One solution to this problem would be to gain customer trust by maintaining rate parity to meet the rate expectations of different customer segments and those who come to you after doing their rate comparison on different platforms. Ensuring this would preserve the integrity of the rates, ensure transparency and control price discrimination. Ensuring the stability and accuracy of rates requires efficient and profitable management of the different distribution channels to guarantee a high volume of reservations each night. That’s when a comprehensive rate parity tool and an advanced online channel distribution tool come in handy.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is another very important aspect of the hospitality industry and needs attention. Hotels today mostly handle online CRM and thus coincides with the term Online Reputation Management.

When it comes to online reputation, any wise mind would swear by the crucial role of social media. Sites used in electronic distribution with respect to social media work together as they allow the travel community to interact and build on each other’s thoughts, especially in terms of reviews.

This process mainly has four main stages. The first stage is the stage of absolute non-acceptance by the client. The second stage is the indifference/consideration stage, in which a customer has doubts about the level of satisfaction with a hotel’s service. The third stage is the ‘delight’ stage. Here, the client is fully satisfied with their services. The fourth stage is when customers become your advocates and actively bring you business through promotions and referrals. ORM aims to take customers from the first stage to the fourth stage.

ORM can help hotels keep their guests informed with important information like inventory, rates, and discounts on a regular basis. Poor channel management equates to poor customer relationship management, so a strong information system that helps effective channel management is one of the potential solutions to key challenges in managing customer service challenges. electronic distribution. Some other factors that influence your CRM strategy are:

• The way a hotel communicates with its website visitors
• The method of obtaining customer information and using it to develop strategies.
• The post-stay behavior of customers who choose to write reviews on metatourism sites

As long as your hotel manager addresses the above factors, you can gain your visitors’ trust in your property.

Any shortfall in service in any of the distribution channels is reflected in the reviews written by consumers. Thus, your hotel’s service capabilities are open to the world with just one click. Negative reviews often become a hindrance to a new visitor’s purchase decision. To meet this challenge, hotels must have a robust mechanism to monitor feedback from different booking channels and analyze the performance of the channel in question.

We can see that all the problems listed above are quite complex and yet they are faced by almost all hotels, especially those that are growing. However, the good news is that there is a simple solution to these problems.

How a Channel Manager can help your Channel Management

A channel manager is an online tool through which you can integrate information from all of your distribution management and use it for different purposes: monitor channel performance over time, add or remove channels, change prices between channels, you name it! to be! Take a look at some of the tremendous benefits you can get.

Boost online reservations

A report from Skift indicates a 7% increase in online bookings, and the same is set to increase now. A channel manager will allow you to focus on your choice of channel from which to funnel sales.

increase revenue

A channel manager helps you update rates and room availability across multiple channels with just a few clicks, so you can accept more bookings faster. You can also have different rates on different channels according to the dominant market segment on each of your channels to generate incremental revenue.

Cope with overselling

Without a channel manager, you are forced to split your inventory across channels and invite the risk of double bookings or lower booking volume. Combined inventory and automatic real-time room updates mean guests can only book a room that’s actually available.

Improve brand recognition

Channel managers help you integrate your data with many popular OTAs, helping your property get listed in as many places as possible and gain popularity.

Boost direct bookings

OTAs may represent the bulk of your sales channel, but a channel manager will help you offer alternatives to your audience, such as your own website, which will eliminate commissions from your bookings that go to the OTA in question for each transaction.

Eliminate manual processes

Having a channel manager means no manually updating Meta tourism websites or responding to countless queries from guests. In this way, you keep both your staff and your guests fully informed about the crucial information of your reservations and availability.

Today we have at our fingertips the technology to be able to control the most dynamic area of ​​a hotel’s operation, channel management. Therefore, it would be unwise not to take advantage of these tools to harness your hotel’s untapped potential for revenue maximization and cost savings.