Is Your Booking Process Optimised

A Host of new features have been released over the last 6 months that can help hotels tweak how they offer rooms to customers. Its probably worth taking a minute to catch up on what they are;

• Early Bookers Discount - Rooms can be set up to automatically offer a discount if a room is being booked in advance ie '5% off if booked 90 days in advance'.
• Last Minute Discount - Rooms can be set up to automatically offer a discount if a room is being booked last minute ie '10% off if booked after 6pm on the day of arrival'.
• FaceBook Rates - Rates displayed on the FaceBook Booking Engine can be different to rates on the website ie 'Rates 5% lower on FaceBook'. This allows hotels to more strongly promote FaceBook as a Booking Channel.
• TripConnect Rates - Rates displayed on TripConnect (on your TripAdvisor Business Listing) can be different to your website, ie 5% lower.
• Mobile Rates - Different rates can be displayed on your mobile website (All AccuBook websites come with a mobile website). ie 'Rates 5% lower on Mobile Website.

In all cases above these rates are NOT passed through the Channel Manager.

In addition there are other steps that have been designed to make the booking process easier and encourage customers to book direct with the hotel ie

• It is possible to stop requiring the customer to enter a full postal address when booking on a Mobile phone, making the booking process faster and smoother.
• It is possible to stop requiring the customer to enter a credit card number (for example with Last Minute Bookings that are happening after midday on the day of arrival when you have more than 10 rooms to sell ie You have a lot of excess inventory).

These are all small steps that can help encourage customers to book direct. We have come across many hotels that DO in fact have these settings already established with the OTA's but they are unaware of it.