To entice consumers to book early, OTAs frequently advertise a free cancellation policy. Along with booking well in advance, the same tactic is used to encourage consumers to book multiple properties, which they can then choose from later. But this all comes at a heavy price for hotels. Guests are incentivized to book without worrying about whether they’re certain about their choice. After all, they can always cancel if they change their mind. Unsurprisingly, this tactic has led to notoriously high OTA cancellation rates. These rates vary significantly among the OTAs. For instance, hotels on Booking.com, (which heavily promotes their free cancellation policy), experience cancellation rates of around 40%. In contrast, hotels on Expedia (which doesn’t heavily advertise this policy) see a cancellation rate of about 20%. Overall, approximately one in five online hotel bookings are cancelled, causing major headaches for hotel revenue managers everywhere. On top of hurting a hotel’s bottom line, a property that relies heavily on OTAs for bookings will find it tough to make good revenue management decisions when so many of these bookings are cancelled. Fighting back against this issue begins with having a better understanding of the booking and cancellation patterns OTAs employ, and then using proper revenue and rate strategies to combat them. Here are five tips worth considering:

1. Require deposits or set non-refundable rates

The first step is to set stricter rate policies for any bookings that are made far in advance (aim for anything over one month). Cancellations tend to happen most commonly within one month before the arrival date, so this approach can help reduce that risk. Ideally, you’ll also want to push this rate policy through channel manager to OTAs, as well as through your own direct channel. Being transparent and consistent across every touchpoint will ensure there’s no room for misunderstanding. It’s worth pointing out that in some cases, OTAs will sneak in a flexible policy to a rate that would otherwise have a different (stricter) policy on the hotel’s own website. This is usually hard to catch since it’s not included on the rate shop report that hotels receive (if using a rate-shopping tool). However, in an often tactical game of cat and mouse, you can take this particular tactic one step further…

2. Use advanced purchase rates with varying lead-time windows

This approach involves offering incremental discounts from Best Available Rate (BAR) based on how far in advance a guest books. For example, this could involve offering a 15% discount for booking 30 days ahead, 20% for booking 60 days in advance, and offering a 25% discount for booking 90 days out. The further out a guest books, the bigger the discount. Using tools like Travel Tripper’s Dynamic Rate Module makes setting these rates even easier. You can base rates and discounts off of lead booking time. Just remember that the advanced purchase rates should always be paired with a strict cancellation policy that’s either non-refundable or requires a deposit.

3. Adopt a (cautious) overbooking strategy

Airlines are notorious for purposefully overbooking flights as a countermeasure for inevitable cancellations. And hotels can use the same tactic to recoup potential lost revenue. However, an overbooking policy requires a careful strategy that takes into account various factors including historical data, seasonal trends, and market compression. To start, look at past data to find out the typical percentages of materialized bookings across all channels (this number is all the bookings you receive minus all cancelled bookings). Based on this figure, you can then create a reliable oversell number. You’ll also want to monitor patterns that reveal cancellation trends. You can apply this to seasonal periods, specific days of the week, or even to the type of bookings that are most likely not to show up. For instance, last-minute leisure bookings on a Friday night might cancel more often than any other group. Spotting patterns lets you prepare by increasing your overbooking limits accordingly. An overbooking policy also requires a consideration of your reputation. If your market is compressed, finding alternative accommodation for a guest might prove tricky. Long-term, turning a guest away without a solution might lead to a negative review that hurts you far more than having an unoccupied room. Naturally, you naturally don’t want to turn guests away very often. But with a data-driven approach, you can minimize the risk of this happening while maximizing occupancy rates throughout the year.

4. Sweeten the deal for booking direct

Many travelers who book your hotel on an OTA website will inevitably make their way to your own hotel website, as a way of further vetting your property and to compare your website’s price to the OTA. This is your chance to win over these guests and get them to cancel their OTA reservation and book direct. Advertise exclusive packages or free perks offered to guests that book direct. For instance, you could offer guests that book three months in advance a free room upgrade, or a 25% discount off their first meal at the hotel restaurant. Companies like Stay Wanderful also allow guests to add extra perks to their bookings, such as discounts with local attractions, tour companies, and restaurants. A unique offer that’s only available directly with your hotel will make it a compelling reason to book—and not cancel last minute. If guests do choose to book direct, develop the relationship prior to the stay so that they are incentivized to keep their bookings. Send personalized correspondence prior to the stay that offers helpful advice, a free guide to the neighborhood, or simply just asking if there is anything they will need during their visit.

5. Monitor where your cancellations are coming from

Although we’re able to see general cancellation trends across all the hotels we work with, that doesn’t mean that it necessarily applies to your hotel. Every marketplace and hotel are unique, which means you need to monitor your own data to understand where your cancellations are coming from. Compare cancellation rates across your various channels to see where the majority of cancellations are taking place. This will allow you to adjust your strategy based on channel. If you’re seeing higher cancellation rates through Expedia, for example, you can create a specific revenue management practice around this information. If you know x% of cancellations will happen last minute, you could raise overbooking thresholds for your entry-level room categories, or increase rates based on booking window and channel instead of booking density. The important thing is to allow data to guide your decision making.

General cancellation policies

Sky-high OTA cancellation rates are a nuisance to deal with, but hotels can adopt several revenue management tactics to combat the problem. In summary:

• Require deposits or set non-refundable rates
• Use advanced purchase rates with varying lead time windows
• Adopt an overbooking strategy
• Sweeten the deal for booking direct
• Monitor your channels to see where cancellations are coming from

  Especially if your hotel relies heavily on OTA business, implementing these revenue strategies can help you mitigate high cancellation rates and optimize the revenue coming into your hotel. Source: www.traveltripper.com

Negative SEO is a term usually used to describe an attack on your website by a competitor to lower your SEO, this can take the shape of spammy links being built to your site, hacking, or content duplication just to name a few common ones. While it’s important to be aware of the potential external threat, your competitors are not the only secret SEO assassins you should be looking out for. You may be damaging your own SEO and not even know about it! There are a number of ways to protect yourself from an external or self-inflicted sabotage. Here are 6 things you definitely shouldn’t be doing if you want to avoid a damaging attack or self-sabotage to your hotel’s website.

 

1. Using the wrong keywords

When doing keyword research, it’s easy to automatically get stuck on the first important keywords that come to mind, but effective keyword use relies on a whole lot more. Let’s say you’re a hotel just a short 10-minute drive from Dublin Airport. Your first instinct may be to want to appear for keywords like “airport hotel” or “hotel near Dublin airport”. A lot of people search for those, right? They must be what I’m after! They aren’t, and here is why: they’re too common. Keywords like these are so in-demand and competitive that your chances of appearing top of the list for them is slim-to-none, especially considering the fact that there are several other hotels that are a lot closer and a lot more qualified to answer to the query at hand. What you should be focused on are the low-hanging fruit. These are the low volume, specific key words and phrases that will bring in users who will actually convert, better known as long-tail keywords.  

2. Using too many links

Linking too often to external sites can be quite damaging to your own SEO. Regardless of whether they link internally or externally, you should avoid putting an excessive amount of links on a single given page. Search engines will only crawl a certain number of links per page, meaning that some links may be left out if your page is flooded with them. Additionally, every extra link weakens the influence and authority of all the other links on the page. From a user’s standpoint, excessive linking may also lead to issues accessing or reading the content. Although Google’s penalty is something to really look out for, the real damage comes from the unnatural outbound links making your page look spammy as a consequence. The more spammy the content, the less trustworthy your website will be listed by the search engines, and the higher your bounce rates will be.  

3. Paying for spammy links

This one is all about quality over quantity. Back in the day, it was common practice to get involved in backlink purchasing, hidden link and link network schemes and link farms to improve SEO. Nowadays, though, with vast improvements to sapm-909485_640search engine intelligence and the way they rank results, not only do these archaic practices no longer work, but they are also actively and consistently penalised. While you may be tempted to buy links from link farms, or get yourself listed just about everywhere you can, fight the urge. There is no doubt that backlinks from reputable sources are very valuable to your own authority and ranking. Links from untrustworthy or spam-filled sources, on the other hand, may undo all the good the other sites were contributing. Although several SEO guides will tell you to look out for competitor sabotage with regards to spammy links, Moz explains, all may not be as it seems.  

4. Duplicating pages and content

This is one of the most common ways you or a competitor could cause negative SEO to your site. A competitor can sabotage you by scraping your website’s content and copying it over to other websites, often as part of the previously mentioned “link farms”. You can sleep soundly, though, in the knowledge that Google’s recent updates to their crawl and ranking methods have included methods to combat this practice. This means that when Google comes across duplicated content on several sites, it only selects one to use in the ranking and results. Usually, this would be you, as it chooses the one indexed first. Keep an eye out for duplication of your content. A tool like Copyscape can easily pick up on duplicated pages and content on external sources. Competitors aren’t the only ones to watch out for in this respect, you have to ensure you aren’t the culprit behind duplicated content yourself! Make sure that all the content on your website is original and that every page is unique. You can check for duplicate content on your own site through a tool like SEO Profiler. Here, you can run a full analysis of your site and flag a number of errors and warnings, including duplicate or unoriginal content.

5. Overusing keywords

We previously discussed keywords in depth in our previous installment of our guide to SEO, but keyword overuse is worth mentioning again in more detail here. Excessive keyword usage can be very damaging to your SEO.wordcloud Stuffing your page full of the same repetitive keywords will upset search engines and be interpreted as spam. Google will not prioritize you. Instead, you’ll be more likely to find yourself faced with a penalty. They will interpret this practice as trying to work around the algorithm, rather than focusing on a good user experience, which is their number one priority. The rule of thumb here is quality over quantity. Pick the right keywords and use them in the most relevant and appropriate way and you’ll be the winner at the end of the day.  

6. Forgetting the Meta Data

Omitting meta data is akin to turning the stove on to the lowest to boil water. Sure, you could still boil water without turning on the stove to full blast, but it’ll be a lot more work than it needs to be. The meta data for your website is what will drive users from the search engine to your site to make a booking. Search engines need this little bit of behind-the-scenes text to be able to read and understand your content during its crawl. The meta data is essentially the bit of text that will dictate to the search engine exactly what your webpage and website are all about. Without it, they may have difficulty picking up the key words and phrases, leading to a little search engine confusion and damaged authority. Whilst meta data won’t make or break your results ranking, it is important to keep in mind that it often dictates your search results appearance and therefore plays a key role in your click-through-rate and trustworthiness. SEO is daunting, and it may seem like there is a whole lot to watch out for in terms of negative SEO. There is, but there is also a whole lot you can do right. Search engine optimization is a game of chess between you and the search engine providers. Play by the rules and make the right moves, and you’ll win. No need for cheating here!   Source: Original article

No, for those of you who appreciated Alvin Lee and Ten Years After as a kid, this is not about music, this is about the 10 year anniversary of the technology explosion caused by Facebook, Twitter, iPhone and Android.

Technology has finally been applied to hotels – it’s about time! Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Text, Chat and much more are here to stay.

The rise of digital technology has molded a new kind of traveler, one who embraces available tools and uses them to jump across industry-defined silos. These new travelers do not need handholding; they need the resources and technology to be able to be self-sufficient. They want to be able to make reservations, check-in and plan their trip via a virtual concierge, all while sharing their experience on their social media outlets. Although today’s traveler demands a high degree of personalization, increased technology use has created an interesting paradox: the human part of the service economy may diminish in importance with the rise of the independent, digital traveler forging his or her own way. Big data offers a way for travel companies to provide that invisible pillar of support to balance the inevitable expectation of a customized experience while simultaneously enhancing the need to remain independent. The boundary between professional and private worlds is increasingly blurred as a result of mobile devices that are changing business travel as we know it. Business travelers, especially Millennials, want to access readily available deals and tools when they travel. A recent survey by Pullman Hotels reports that: 43 percent of international travelers always take their mobile professional devices with them on holiday or on weekend trips. 89 percent of seasoned international travelers say mobile professional devices are a means of staying in touch with their loved ones. While there is a real conflict between personal and professional lives of travelers, business travelers are more upfront about adding on leisure time at the end of business trips. This traveler is known as the “bleisure” traveler and is now becoming a target for many properties. This presents new opportunities for airlines, hotels and destinations alike, all of which have to configure their services to be flexible. Conference and meeting planners also need to be cognizant of these changes. In addition to mobile devices changing business travel, they have created new sources for bookings. Travelers are overwhelmed by choices when booking online and mobile is creating the need for a better-curated experience. Booking providers can deliver well-targeted information to travelers due to their mining and analysis of all kinds of data. The growth of HotelTonight is an example of a mobile solution that focuses on the user experience and provides a quick and easy booking opportunity. With the mobile explosion has come the launch of apps that are helping merge customer service with the digital age. Apps are being used for everything from a digital concierge experience to accessing big data. Geo-location can make it easy to sell guests something that is literally right in front of them. A prime example is 1App, which sends guests deals to eat, shop and play in accessible areas. While we tried it as a beta test for hospitality, it has found a place in the retail sector. When thinking about how apps are changing the industry, it is also important to remember that the days of “walk-in” reservations are dwindling.  With today’s technology, guests rarely walk in to inquire about room availability. Instead, they turn to mobile tools to make their reservation. Mobile is the new walk-in. And, as most have heard, many hotel guests are checking in via mobile phones this year. While it is only effective for a party of one, (your significant other will not be able to use the smart phone key as only one at a time can be issued) this is available at select Marriott and Hilton properties. In addition to using apps to increase reach, hospitality businesses are utilizing the power of social media to grow. Facebook improves brand reputation, enhances listings and allows businesses to offer unique deals. Twitter lets hotels connect with guests in real time. However, it is not easy to set up and optimize your Facebook page and maintain your Twitter account without paying someone qualified to do it.  Social media must be a crucial component of the marketing mix. Think of your property’s Facebook page as a second website with the option for guests to contact hotel staff and make reservations. Technology and the importance of mobile sites are not just a trend, they are the new reality of hospitality. Having an understanding and a strategy for digital technology and mobile sites is key to successfully being able to reach the “new” traveler. Now is the time to tighten up mobile sites and find a balance between customer service and the self-sufficient traveler. Millennials have arrived and many other travelers have a millennial mindset. Yes, ten years after the tech explosion, times have changed. Embrace it – and enjoy a great remainder of 2017! Robert Rauch, CHA, is a nationally recognized hotelier and President of R. A. Rauch & Associates, Inc., a leading hospitality management and consulting firm. Rauch has over 35 years of hospitality-related management experience in all facets of the industry. Widely recognized as the \`hotel guru,\` Mr. Rauch maintains a blog where he expounds upon insights and trends in the hospitality industry at www.hotelguru.com . Along with the blog, he also publishes Hospitality Innsights, an electronic newsletter that is distributed monthly. Mr. Rauch held nearly every position in the hotel business including General Manager of full-service Four Diamond hotels for Hilton and Embassy Suites. His education includes a bachelor’s degree in Hotel Administration from Western International University and a master’s degree in Tourism Administration from Arizona State University. He is a Certified Hotel Administrator and has served as chairman of numerous tourism organizations nationally and in the western U.S. He has been directly involved in developing several leading brand hotels, some of which the firm still owns and manages. R. A. Rauch & Associates, Inc. currently operates hotels in California, Arizona and Colorado with several under development.   Source: www.4hoteliers.com