It is hard to swallow the fact that your website has a strong competitor in Booking.com. And maybe sometimes people don’t even want to consider the facts. But it is good to get the facts. This will help you to be at least more aware of how to be profitable.
There are good things about Booking.com for sure. Over the past few years, Booking.com has been a real aid to hotels by providing quite a bit of value as it helped them in the transition regarding the model of distribution that each hotel that wants to be successful had to adapt to once the Internet took over the world in full force.
The main key features and positive things include the following:
♦ Clients could pay directly to the hotel. There was the provision of availability immediately and price updates were viable.
♦ Eventually quotas were eliminated.
♦ There was increased transparency, which brought hotels in closer connection with the clients.
♦ Additionally, there was the final commission that was added. For non-preferential hotels, it was set at 16.5 percent and it was as set for preferential hotels at 18.7 percent. This equated to overall increased profitability due to the reasonable cost that Booking.com insisted on.
♦ This allowed for the control of the retail price, due to the inclusion of the fact of direct payment. The hotels can control the price the client pays and therefore can know exactly how much they are selling to clients. The sad fact is that there are not many other intermediaries that can provide assurance of the same guarantee.
Also, Booking.com has been designed to provide a great platform that is considered almost perfect in respect of being able to address a hotelier’s ultra-pressing situations with simply the click of a button, without the hassle of having to bother with phone calls or emails.
There has been also a service ladder, which has been added to this technology, which is the team of account managers. They aid hoteliers in using the system and deal with their inquiries, as well as address the need for proactive changes in a helpful manner. This set up of offering both a product and service had caused hotels to continually sign up with Booking.com, meaning that hotels have truly become “bookingized.”
The need to increase direct sales for the sake of reducing dependence
Because of dealing with overwhelmingly expensive fees for OTA, especially in relation to using Booking.com, hotels are now reverting to boosting their own direct sales. Sometimes hotels are seeking to increase sales to levels they successfully experienced in the past. On the other hand, there are some hotels who simply desires to see growth since residual times. Whatever the situation, there seems to be a sure guarantee of conflict. The reason for this is due to the presence of Booking.com and the hotel website both want the same clients.
So the truth is:
♦ If you desire to succeed at getting a client to book on your website, you must retrieve it from another website, which most frequently will be Booking.com.
♦ No client likely will book on your website without prior also having taken time to browse Booking.com along with other sites.
