Reacting to Room Demand
Demand Management on Allocation Page
Of all the articles we have sent to our customers recently, the one that has generated the most amount of feedback concerns Channel Prioritising.
One customer in particular went to town with the 'little red button' (now green) and managed to acquire 76% of their online bookings through their own website in October compared with just 42% in September. (A whopping 3200€ saved in commission). We know that hotels CAN get direct bookings if they really want to, but results like that still shock us.
The trick of course is to know when to prioritise (sell rooms on your own website only) and when not to. Some of our customers base their decision on the Demand Manager Graph (Tab Day Manager/Demand Manager), this shows days where they have high demand and should be able to sell rooms direct only, but we are still coming across customers who dont know where this graph is or what it means.
For this reason we have put this information on the page where we know most hotels go to........the Allocation page. The more observant of you have been asking what the blue graph is across the top of the Allocation Page? This is us showing you how much demand there is on a given day. It should give you an instant impression of the days when you should be thinking about selling direct through your website only.
Other Changes;
Why dont i see a Demand Graph on my Allocation Page? Some customers are not marketing their own website and so demand for rooms on their own website is very low, Unless demand goes above a certain threshold we do not display it on the Allocation Page as it could give you a distorted picture.
Why is the Channel Prioritisation Button Green now instead of Red and why has it been renamed to 'Prioritise Booking Engine'? We had some customers who thought that ticking the Red 'Close OTA's' Button meant they were closing ALL their rooms, whereas in fact they were only closing the OTA's. We are still not sure if this 100% clear, so if anyone has any suggestions please let us know.
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