1. The plethora of choices available to consumers in most locations
2. The perishable nature of your accommodation product, and
3. The ease at which consumers can research, compare and book properties.

It creates an environment where providers are clamouring to gain the attention of travel bookers with all sorts of tricks, facades
and pricing strategies. This often leads to discounting wars and ultimately a race to
the bottom, especially when demand is low.

So how do you gain that valuable attention without prostituting your product to the market? How can you stand out from the crowd and be a property of desire, well suited to your target markets needs and wants? What strategies can you implement to ensure you are clear about your properties standout strengths, and how can you portray them, in a moment, to capture the consumers’ attention?

Often you only have a moment or two, or as Google put it, a micro-moment, to inspire the savvy travel booker and convey your message that you are the right property for them. Even if it’s just to hold their attention for a moment longer to research your property a little further.

There are two ways to go about this;
1. Consult Yourself (Who do you believe is your competitive set?)

This can be based off your local area and or your product style or level. For example, pricing similarities, local attractions and relative location to your product vs. other properties, market appeal and specialities, e.g. family friendly, boutique, couples focused etc.

How you break it down will come down to your local knowledge and research. The key to this selection
criteria is research, visit your perceived competitors both in person and online, look at their pricing and marketing strategies then break it down. This will be how you will get a feel for who you should be competing with. So, this competitive set will be key in many future decisions that you may make from pricing, to product development and marketing.

2. Consult the Market Place

Simply, this is who the market is looking at when they look at booking your property or those similar to yours. Here you can look at traffic volumes using online tools such as semrush.com and follow.net. Even some of the third-party websites and their reports such as on Booking.com, they quite often will show you which other hotels the consumer is looking at before or after you and who the consumer is booking after completing their research (Importantly when you are part of that research). Also, you can look to reputation management sites, at time consumers will tell you why they stayed at other hotels vs. yours or
visa-versa.

In the end you will need to come down to selecting a manageable competitive set to be able to bench
mark your businesses performance against.
Without this benchmark it can be difficult at times to decide if it’s your business, or the market, that is doing well, or poorly? It’s worth understanding this as it can be a powerful motivator in helping you achieve the best outcomes for your bottom line!

So how do you cut through these barriers and consumer resistance? It starts with knowing (or developing) your unique strengths, that set you apart from your competition, and then finding a unique way of portraying the message. But it all begins with firstly identifying your unique strengths.

How do you decide what is unique about your asset? It can be difficult to take the blinkers off and really develop some objective opinion here. Current marketing trends (ones that we believe will be around for a while to come) suggest that being able to tell a story and make it personal is the way to go. Big brand, multinational corporates and overtly cookie cutter operations are becoming the “Yesterday” of business. Have a look at the really successful players and how they are marketing, it’s all about unique locations, their people in each operation and personalities behind the product that is getting traction.

We suggest that deciding what’s unique about your product can be broken down in a few areas to help you make it easier to identify:

Hotel Facilities – obviously and of course that’s a great place to star

In Room Experience – every room is different, why yours?

Quality of Product – are you high end, value for money or budget?

Quality of Service – full service, basic or hands off?

People & Personalities – This can certainly be your staff but also can be your valued guests. Search hard for the stories.

Hotel’s History – everybody loves a good story, try to lean into the history of your property and have it help you stand for something.

Guest Favourites – look to see what your guests are saying. Check review sites and listen to their feedback and stories. Sometimes you will get lucky and pick up that all encompassing and winning tag line from what they have to say. If you are ever in doubt ask your guests, they will always tell you in a heartbeat.

Start by writing down a list and identifying the attractions that tick one of two boxes:

1. They have really strong pulling power (visitation)
and/or
2. If you were to partner with them, could you create a unique offering?

After you have written down your ideas and thoughts on this topic, your next step, if you haven’t done this already is to go to your local tourism marketing body or chamber of commerce or even the local attraction owners! And ask the questions. Look to their visitor or entry numbers, ask them if they will share it with you, who knows you might even be able to enter into some marketing and sales partnership something that could give you that edge you are looking for? The local vineyard doing 3 weddings every weekend but don’t offer accommodation? The train ride that’s famous in the area that doesn’t have a family friendly accommodation partnership.

The idea is to build a list existing attractions and/or potential future offerings with these attractions that will go into the mix.

Download the tool attached to this module and populate the fields following the below instructions

The purpose of a Decision Matrix is to pass the decision making process through a selection filter and so reduce the subjectivity in decision making. When decisions are made it is rare that the factors that influence your decision are weighted equally.

Step 1. Create a list of all the unique strengths about your property and enter them across the top of the matrix.
Step 2. Brainstorm the Criteria/Factors that impact on the decision to be made. Aim for at least 5-10 such factors. Accept all suggestions at this stage. We have pre-loaded the tool with some basics, however you can create your own specific to you.
Step 3. Having chosen the selection Criteria/Factors, you now need to weight them individually to jointly total 100. (See example below in the Weight column)
Step 4. With the weighting in place you can now go ahead and score each of the selected options against each factor. Remember that your score for each option cannot exceed the weighting you have allocated to the factor. It is highly recommended that your first option be used as your benchmark for scoring the others and so rate it at 50% of the allocated weight. It is significantly easier to work across the table (scoring each Factor for each of the Unique Strengths) and then down to the next factor. This enables you to focus on one factor at a time. You then total all the scores.
Step 5. Discuss and agree the best option based on the scores. Pick your top 3 or 4 unique strengths that you feel you can now base all your future marketing upon. These we will call your ‘Top Motivators’.
Step 6. Your finished Decision Matrix could look like something like this before scoring.

Break it down into the points of research you have done and prepared above. Complete a full story, while you won’t regularly use the whole story, outside of maybe a small section on your website, you now have a “Story” to provide you with the foundations for each marketing piece you develop over the time to come. You have a foundation document to keep up to date as time moves on and your product and local area develops and changes. It’s this story you can use when you refer people to points about your product when you talk to them, directly or via the all-important responses on the reputation sites. It will become “Your Story” and “Your foundation” of who you and your product are.

For most practical use on the many platforms at your disposal, we encourage you to write two versions of the story. A long one first, perhaps 300-500 words, and then summarise into a shorter one of just 2-3 sentences.

Classic Motel Room
Deluxe Motel Room
Classic Apartment
Deluxe Apartment

Equally in your room descriptions, which will be populated not only on your website but on the many booking channels, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the booker. What do they need to know, what are they looking for and what do they assume would be part of the offering already? For an example, there is probably no need to tell your booker there is a phone or an alarm clock in the room anymore as most people have mobile phones that can fulfil that function now. So, don’t waste valuable content space with that sort of information. Be brief, to the point and appeal to what your market is looking for. You have just a few moments to hold their attention before they may move on to the next offering.

By selecting just four, it will help you become very clear in your messaging. After listing the top 4, try to emulate it into just one sentence. Then it’s important to test this out, try them out on a variety of contacts, importantly none that are emotionally invested in giving you the feedback you want to hear. Secondly use people who are not aware of your product intimately. If a layperson gets it and motivates them, you are on a winner. Word of warning, please trial this out and be willing to adapt. Never commit an entire campaign without some form of testing. You wouldn’t buy a car without driving it first?

It may take some tweaking, but by working on it, testing and sharing, it will certainly come to fruition. Your tag line is just a handful of words that easily encompass the core of your offering.

Logon to the Hotel Growth Gurus Portal and download the available FRAMEWORK files.

Use the STRATEGY SELECTION TOOL to decide which frameworks to add to your MASTER HOTEL STRATEGY & Action Plan

So firstly, you have to think like the owner of a retail business or retail shopfront. The old school way. You know, where you open the store up every day, attract people into your store, present you whares in the best way possible, provide outstanding customer service, and hopefully somewhere along the way, MAKE SOME SALES!! The same rules apply not only in ‘modern retail’ but can equally be applied to a ‘modern accommodation business’. Let me break it down for you. Below listed are the key fundamentals of traditional bricks and mortar retailing and then how each principle can be applied to your Hotel website.

Opening Hours
In traditional retail, if you doors aren’t open, it’s impossible to sell your goods. A good store keeper ensures their doors are always open ready for the next buyer. Some shops are 9am-5pm x 5 days a week while others trade more to the extreme at 24 hours x 7 days a week.
Your Hotel website allows you to trade 24/7. Once upon a time you could only be selling (taking bookings) while ever your reception was open and able to take phone calls or walk-ins. Now, your doors are open around the clock.

Appealing Shop Front/Window
Having an eye grabbing and enticing shop front and exterior presence, has always been key in attracting retail shoppers through the front doors of any retail business. First impressions count and unless we can get people through the front doors, there’s no chance of a sale.
It’s no different on your website either, the first impression is super critical. This means that from the very first image they see, to the colour scheme used, to the language and emotive connections you make along with even the web page loading speed, all must be just right, to grab the attention of your target audience and engage them so they remain on your website to view the rest of your ‘shop’.

Attracting Attention / Floor Traffic
So the doors are open and the shop front looks great. The next thing you have to get right is floor traffic. More people through the doors, should mean more money in the cash register. So retailers typically begin advertising, running specials, conducting instore promotions, competitions, giveaways, loyalty campaigns and the list goes on. Anything to bring people back through the doors, in other words ‘Advertising & Marketing’.
In the modern hotel marketplace, how market your property to get traffic to your store (your Hotel website)? Again, the principle remains the same, you do whatever you have to, to drive more and more traffic to your website, then let the conversions take care of themselves. The good news, is that it is very manageable and measureable now. You can actually see what marketing activities are driving traffic results, and even follow them through to conversion.
The even better news is that you’re not only looking to grab the attention of pedestrians in your local area (so to speak), you have the ability to grab the attention of anyone, anywhere looking to book accommodation in your area right now. And you can reach them, while you sleep even!

Fully Stocked Shelves with Great Products
Having fully stocked shelves with a great range of products, in a retail environment, demonstrates choice for consumers and helps appeal to the buyers ‘immediacy’ impulse, so they know that if they make a decision, they can walk away with their purchase today! Again attractive displays play a role, along with everything being well layed out, organised into sections and accurately priced, helps consumers simplify their buying process.
So when it comes to your hotel website it is critical you have beautiful imagery of your property accurately representing the property and helping the visitor to quickly and easily understand what your property stands for and provides. Often you only have seconds to do this so the more you can use imagery and icons the better. Better still if you can seamlessly link pricing and availability so visitors can see it alongside your product (room) range, it all makes it easier for the visitor to surmise if you are the right hotel for them. A key part of this is having “Live-Availability” via a booking engine on your site.

Customer Service
In days gone by, customer service was often the hall mark of many a great retail outlet. And while we now live in a more price sensitive, product educated society, it remains relevant for Hotel websites.

When we talk about Hotel websites and customer service, what we mean is the usability and user experience your website provides as visitors are going the booking process. Now we talk more on this later, but in simple terms, is your website easy to use and how does it make people feel when they use it.

Making the Sale / The Checkout
At the end of the day, the goal is to get people in the store to pick something up, take it to a sales counter and buy it. While Great pricing, special deals, customer service and pushy sales people can help this along to ‘get the sale’, it is a just a little different in the digital world for Hotels.

First of all (and assuming you have taken care of all of the above), you must make it plainly obvious for visitors how they can make a purchase. Having “Book Now” or “Check Availability” buttons littered everywhere on your site is absolute mandatory, so that it is always visible and ready for the micro moment when a travel booker is ready to buy. Better still, why not embed your booking engine on you website so people don’t need to leave to make a booking. We must make the checkout process obvious and seem-less, because unfortunately while we are available 24/7, we don’t typically have 24/7 customer service staff monitoring visitor behaviour and helping get the sale across the line.

Well clearly the game has changed with the entrance, and rapid development, of the world wide web and the ready access it has given to the travel booker to a plethora of accommodation options. All at your fingertips, on any device anywhere, anytime with up to date information, pictures, rates and availability. A booking can be made within a few simple clicks.

Be Online or Die

85% of all Travel planning is done online and your Hotel website should be the cornerstone of your online presence. That only leaves 15% of searches doing it the old way.

77% of all online search is conducted on Google. If people can’t easily find your website on Google, you’re really not in the game.

Once a travel booker gets that far (Google search), it’s open to the masses, where not only all accommodation providers (your direct competitors) are fighting for the travel bookers’ attention. But so are the really big players such as Booking.com, Expedia as well as all the meta search travel websites. You have to be in the mix here somewhere to at least be found some of the time, by some of the lookers.

53% of people who visit an OTA or TPI (eg; Booking.com), will actually visit your direct hotel website, to check for best rate, see the whole property and find out more. This presents the biggest opportunity to capture a new guest while they are in the planning/booking phase.

Be on Mobile or be Imobilised

The rise of smartphone and mobile devices is prolific to say the least, and it heavily weighs into the travel industry with consumer behaviour changing dramatically. These days, 77% of people don’t leave home without their mobile device, so having a mobile responsive website is critical to your success in converting online bookings.

47% of all last minute hotel bookings made online, are made from a mobile device. Last minute means typically any bookings made in the 24-48 hours prior to arrival, which for many destinations can be a large proportion of their booking demand. So if you aren’t easily found and booked on mobile devices, you risk losing out on all this ‘last minute’ business.

Smartphones are used massively throughout the travel process (inspiration, research, booking, experience, post stay) by 67% of leisure travellers and 78% of business travellers.

Only 23% of those who encountered a website on a mobile device that wasn’t mobile optimized, actually pushed through and continued using the site.

33% of mobile travel searchers, actually want to complete their transaction the same day.

Google found that a poor mobile website experience was the #1 reason for not making a reservation.

In its most simplest form, if an entered search term was “Toys for Kids”, it would find all the web pages that contain the words “Toys for Kids” in them. So to appear for that search term should be easy (or at least once upon a time it may have been). But not only will a search engine present all pages with “Toys for Kids” in it, there are many layers to how the search engines look for this information and then they want to present, to the searcher, the most relevant website for them.

Currently, keeping up with SEO algorithm changes, has become almost impossible for the budding independent hotelier hoping to manage their own website. Managing your own website is a great idea so you can keep your content fresh and up to date. But as far as keeping up with algorithm changes we have 4 suggestions that will help you gain some traction in what has become a difficult and competitive environment:

Hire a Pro
There is just too much involved, and too much at risk to get the SEO fundamentals wrong for your site. Unless you have an IT background, are a complete tech geek and really know what you are doing, or you’re about to sit a course in SEO and web design, we suggest leaving to the professionals. We know you have plenty of things to take care of in the day to day running of your property, without adding this to your work load. The aim here is to get it set up with the ‘correct technical SEO structure’ based upon some thoughtful keyword research that highlights key search terms that are relevant to your property and location and have strong monthly search history volumes.

Local Search Success
Ensure you have optimized your website for local search functionality. That is, when someone searches for let’s say “Accommodation Sydney”, that you have optimized for this search query. This will involve ensuring your business is listed On Google Maps and that your Google My Business profile is updated. Also ensuring that your address is listed on every page of your website as well as being optimized for the search term relevant to you, such as “Sydney”. Again we suggest highlighting the importance of local search to your web professional.

Make your Website Awesome!
Of course you want an awesome website, however what we mean here is simply to have a really engaging website that people enjoy using and the content is massively valuable towards their travel journey. If all it promotes are the facts about your Hotel (which is lovely I’m sure), it really isn’t adding value and creating interest. Most search engines rank your site not only for all the technical stuff, but user click-through plays a massive role in how you rank. If you think about it this way; Google’s (as an example), goal is to place the most relevant web page (in the world, no less) in front of the person placing a search query. Really this is just a popularity issue. If for a certain search term, the bulk of people continually end up on the same web page, and they spend a reasonable amount of time on the web page consuming the information available, this then proves to Google that it is relevant. And so it then continues to push that web page higher and higher in the organic search results.
By providing content and information about things to do in your local area, this would be just one example of how to provide awesome content that will be consumed.

Digital Repository
A Digital Repository (DR) is a technology solution that does a whole lot more than SEO. It provides a single repository for all your online content (text, images, videos) to be pushed out to all your online channels including your own website. The key here though is that the up keep of your alignment to algorithm changes on search engines, is the responsibility of the repository provider, and as they have many customers to please, it is highly important that they are doing this regularly. Having a repository is simply one means of doing this, but in principal it is important to highlight the need for regular review of your SEO alignment to latest algorithm changes which typically are changed between 300-500 times per year.

In summary, SEO is extremely important and should involve the below three strategies; Technical Correctness, Engaging & Fresh Content, a means for SEO realignment over time.

Imagery/Look & Feel
Only 5% of people remember the facts but 63% of people remember the story. Pictures are more powerful and engaging than words. You should be using full width format and your Images should have people in them. Use of galleries helps consumers to browse and get a feel for your property. No one wants to read loads of information anymore. Employ the use of icons to help describe features and inclusions. So when it comes to presenting your property online the key points to remember are:

i. Beautiful Images in Full Width Format
ii. Use People in your Images so people can imagine themselves at your property.
iii. Use of Visual Icons instead of bullet pointing all your features.
iv. Keep your website clean and as simplified as you can.

Top 10 images that are viewed on a hotel website:

1. Guest Rooms
2. Restaurant
3. Recreation
4. Lobby/Foyer
5. Map
6. Business Centre
7. Pool
8. Amenities
9. Exterior
10. Bar/Lounge

Succinct and Uniform Messaging
On a typical webpage of 100 words, people typically only read 49% of the content. On a page with 600 words only 28% is consumed. So when it comes to telling your story we must Prioritize Your Value Proposition & Get to the Point, quickly. There is no time to create a list of features and inclusions that run off the page. You need to focus on what sets you apart, and what is the intrinsic potential benefit to them should they follow through and book your property. Focus on your key points of difference and what sets you apart from your closest competitors.

An extension of this is using a digital repository as it was described above. But not for SEO purposes this time. The concept of having a DR is great for your overall online presence as well, where-by you have one, single, master resource that holds the standard of digital representation to be used not only on your website, but across every platform you appear on.

The same room names, the same property and room descriptions, same inclusions, images and videos, replicated across the channels to provide a uniformed approach no matter where someone finds you on line.

Use the Power of Video
By the end of the year 2017, according to Cisco, 69% of all consumer web traffic will be video based (this is set to increase to 80% by 2018). So if your website is not adopting the use of video then you will be excluding yourself from a large piece of the ‘prospective guest pie’. Here are a couple of suggestions of ways you can implement the use of video on your website.

Using the full width format, instead of have static images, you can try replacing them with short videos that auto play and again make use of actual people using the hotel facilities.

Have a virtual tour video recorded and place it on your home page and on youtube/vimeo for people to discover the property in 3D. Include either music to create atmosphere or go for more of a ‘guided tour’ feel by providing commentary throughout.

Guest testimonials recorded on your iPhone/smartphone and posted on a review/testimonials page.

Create a time lapse video that shows a complete tour of inside and outside and all key facilities and provides an ‘orientation’ style function so people can quickly asses what the property offers.

By employing the use of video you not only succeed more at telling your story you also are boosted by higher rankings and relevance in the eyes of google’s algorithm.

There are numerous resources and articles around that go into greater detail about User Experience & Usability, and so we don’t plan to re-write the play-book on web design, but simply highlight the key points that are worth focussing on for the accommodation industry.

Below are some resources that may be of interest:

http://blog.leonardo.com/why-usability-and-ux-matter-for-your-hotel-website-an-inside-look-from-our-ux-manager/

https://www.interaction-
design.org/literature/article/usability-a-part-of-the-user-experience

Usability/Ease of Use
Going for a simplistic/minimalist design should be the goal. However is not always that easy to achieve. We often get wrapped up in wanting to provide as much information as possible so people have no excuse for not booking your property. Sometimes, it can be the fact that there is too much information that causes people to abandon your site with information overload. Finding the balance between too much and too little can prove difficult.

Keep the navigation of your site streamlined. Remember you don’t need to show a direct link to every page on your website, clever use of appropriate links in the right locations helps users to easily navigate their way around your site.

Clear Call to Action
The key purpose of any website at the end of day is to have the user take action. So, while it may seem logical to you what action you’d like them to take, you should make it abundantly clear exactly what you’d like them to do. You should have clear Call to Action (CTA) such as a ‘Book Now’ or ‘Check Availability’ button at least once on every page and sometimes more often depending on your design. Basically whenever you think someone may be moved (either emotionally of logically), to want to take the next step, place a CTA right there on the page.

A ‘Check Availability’ button performs better than a ‘Book Now’ button (less committal), however an ‘Availability Calendar’ performs best, because bookers can begin typing and checking dates without having to go off the page they are already on.

Live Rates & Availability
The days of using contact forms or sending emails with reservation enquiries are almost gone. Very few people actually use this function anymore and even fewer have the patience to await your response. No matter how fast you are at responding! The immediacy of consumer demand now requires you to be able to show your rates and availability in real-time. Most travel bookers will not wait for email responses or even call (unless availability is extremely tight) They want to be able to asses and make decisions on the go all while they bounce between multiple sites and devices. Having live availability, especially on your own website, is a must have it todays modern accommodation business.

Conversions Rates
Once you get travel bookers to your website, now it’s time to convert them to a booking. The longer you can keep them engaged and interested on your site the better. Everything we have noted above will help you achieve that, but the key is to actually get the booking. So, a couple of key things to include that will assist with increasing conversion rates;

Include Guest reviews right there on your website using the many widgets that third party sites offer. This stops them from leaving your site to check (as we know they will otherwise do)

Tell them you offer the best rates right there on your site by stating the obvious with terms like “Book Direct & Save” or “Best Rate Guaranteed”. We must provide incentive for guests to book direct on your website and not provide any reason or resistance that might make them leave your site and ultimately book through an OTA (where you’ll clearly pay commissions). Did you know? It is vital that you are not undercutting rates on your own websites, with deals on OTA’s. It is easy to be convinced by the OTA provider to participate in one of their promotions. This is well and good, just ensure the offer is matched, or bettered on your own site.

Minimise Clicks through the checkout. The fewer clicks we can build into the research and booking process, the better the conversion. Understanding at what point, that people abandon your booking process, is key to improving conversions

You don’t need to be Einstein to know that better conversion rates are important. The trick is where to start with firstly measuring them and secondly implementing strategies that help to improve them.

Simple ways to Measure Traffic & Conversions

Phone & Email.

Are you tracking volumes of Email and Phone Enquiries so we can later compare levels as well as conversion rates? Simply keeping track of these can be very helpful in understanding what’s happening in your market and finding ways to improve. (more on this in Module #8 – Know Your Numbers)

Website (Google Analytics)

Once you set up your mobile responsive website, have Google analytics set up so you can begin to monitor traffic volumes and understand the demographics of your website visitors, which will help with future marketing.

Website (Google Analytics)

Within Google Analytics we can set up Google Goals which helps us to target specific outcomes we are seeking. Things like clicks on the Book Now button, helps to understand conversions rates of viewers to enquirers, enquirers to bookings.

Website (Google Analytics)

Track as much detail as possible on bookings made via your website. How frequently is each room type and offer booked? What is their purpose for staying? What was the lead time and Length of stay? All this data will help with your future decisions on offers and promotions and should be easily captured within your PMS (Property Management Software).

Logon to the Hotel Growth Gurus Portal and download the available FRAMEWORK files.

Use the STRATEGY SELECTION TOOL to decide which frameworks to add to your MASTER HOTEL STRATEGY & Action Plan

In Australia, 85% of all accommodation travel planning is conducted online

Travel bookers will visit anywhere from 22-38 different web pages before making a booking./li>

Just under ¾ of Australian hotel shoppers, booked their travel online via OTAs (Online Travel Agents), compared with just 21% who went direct to the hotel

More than 1 in 4 room nights are booked on a mobile device

47% of all last minute hotel bookings are made from a mobile device

71% of Leisure Travellers and 86% of Business Travellers switch between multiple devices to conduct the same travel related activity.

So when it comes to running a modern accommodation business, you must be prominent in the online world across all device types, otherwise the ability for bookers to find you, means you’re almost invisible. So, what impacts your online visibility is the question. This module sets out how to unravel and simplify this elusive equation. Below we have outlined the big pieces of the puzzle you must get right in order to increase your hotel’s online visibility and ultimately be found by the modern travel booker.

So, let’s look at it this way:

Out of 100 people looking to book accommodation, 85 of them will do it online.

Of those 85, 66 will do it on Google.

So, if we are going to make a concerted effort to improve our ability to be found when someone decides to try and look for accommodation in your area, it makes perfect sense to optimize your business to appear prominently in Google search results.

Appearing on page 1 search results (SERP) is critical, as the statistics demonstrate that unless you are on page 1, the odds of travel bookers clicking on your website are very dismal indeed. Below is simply an explanation of how Google works and why people see what they do on page 1 of a Google search result.

Google Basics & Architecture
There are 3 distinct areas on page 1 of Google when consumers are searching for accommodation providers, and therefore, 3 distinct means by which you can begin to optimize your online visibility. Below is a more detailed pictorial explanation.

Google Paid Advertising Results

a. These are the top 4 positions on a SERP (plus another 3 listings at the bottom).
b. They are all derived from companies investing budgets into Google Adwords who are prepared to pay on a cost per click basis to jump the que and have their ads appear before all other organic search results.
c. Basically, if you have a big enough budget, you can appear at the top of the page as much as you want. However, the big companies tend to have this sewn up and it is often not viable to compete in this space.
d. Although, we still encourage businesses to take a look at it for their specific situation. If your location or property is unique in some way, you may be able to implement a Google Adwords strategy that could just work.

Google Hotel Listing Results (Google Local Search)

e. This only applies to accommodation based searches. So anyone who is including words like Hotel, Motel, Accommodation, etc in their search term, Google will then bring up an additional 3-pack of local search results below the “Paid” Section.
f. This used to be called Google Hotel Finder but is now fully integrated into Page 1 search results. This feature is constantly evolving as Google weighs in on the online Hotel Booking space.
g. It is heavily tied to your properties presence within Google Maps, Google My Business listing and Google Reviews. (see the FRAMEWORK attached to this module, “Hot Wire for Google Local Search”) We highly recommend focusing on this area.

Google Organic Search Results

h. This is traditional ‘relevant’ search results for a given keyword phrase and is often seen as the more trusted results. (this is where your SEO work fits in)
i. While its position on page 1 is below ‘paid’ and below ‘local search’ results, it ultimately has a starting position at #8, it is in effect about half way down the page, and nowadays is below the fold (off screen).
j. However, the news is not all bad. Our earlier research indicated that as many as 80% of users trust the organic search results more, and as a result consume 80% of click through traffic. More recent data suggests this number is closer to 95% (see diagram on next page). So, it is still definitely worth focusing on organic search success.

The confusing part for hoteliers is the rapidly changing landscape with Google, making its ‘Hotel Listings’ appearance in recent times, and how to go about appearing prominently within that feature. We see this as the biggest opportunity to rapidly increase your online visibility, particularly for Google search results.

As SEO becomes more and more complicated and difficult to achieve, its relevance and importance does not diminish. There are many providers out there who promise to unlock the ‘search algorithm’ and hence capture that all favoured 1st page search result. It’s got to a stage now where it is very hard and can also be very expensive to achieve. However, understanding that, close to 95% of consumers don’t trust Paid search results, it is still worth the effort in pursuing organic SEO in most cases.

Despite the cries that SEO is dead, we are not going to try and unpack the mystery right here, rather offer some practical advice that can help you optimize your organic listings without over focusing your time or money in doing so.

SEO Simple Advice for Hoteliers

Hire a Professional – if the platform or template you are using for your hotel website doesn’t already provide some form of SEO, then bring in the guys that know what they’re doing but make sure it’s within a budget. There are thousands of actions you can take to optimize but use the 80/20 rule that by getting the basics in place will often be enough.

Ensure Local SEO is in place – because the accommodation game is clearly based around location. Ensure that every page has your name, address and phone number correctly placed on it. This is critical to search results.

Keep your site updated regularly – this is good in Google’s eyes because they see that your information is not dated.

Content Marketing helps with SEO – I won’t explain why, just what you need to do. Create lots of additional pages on your site (perhaps using a blog) that provides loads of great information about not only your hotel, but your local area, what’s on, where to eat, what to do. For example, you could write a series of articles on “Top 5 ________ to _______ while in YOUR TOWN”. Things to See, Places to Eat, Activities to Do.

Mobile Responsive & Backlinks – as noted in the last module (#3) these both help tremendously with SEO.

Think about who Google’s customers really are. It’s the person typing the search query. It is Google’s goal to please that person by providing them with the MOST RELEVANT search results.

Therefore, all the technical algorithm stuff is geared towards that end. Forget the techo approach and make sure your website is appealing, informative, enjoyable, entertaining and appropriate to your target demographic. Keep it simple. Unless you are creating a useful and easy to use resource, you simply won’t rank.

The Trusted Advisor
When it comes to travel, Trip Advisor (TA) is the ‘go to’ resource for discovering the ‘truth’ about what real customers are saying about travel related products and services. So, for hoteliers, it is obvious to not only have a presence, but have a professional and most importantly, high ranking profile. The higher your ranking on TA, the stronger your online visibility is on that channel. Also, now that TA are moving into online bookings, it has become even more critical to perform here as the reduced friction of creating bookings on this channel makes for a strong proposition.

The TA Ranking Algorithm
So what factors go into increasing your ranking? While not everything is revealed, we can ascertain that TripAdvisor’s Popularity Index algorithm is based on three key ingredients:

the quality

the quantity

the recency of reviews

Trip Advisor are adamant that their scores are reflective of their users views and opinions and they “take content integrity very seriously and screen every review. If you are caught breaking our guidelines, it can take a big hit on your popularity ranking.” in short, don’t try and cheat the system as you’ll get caught!

But, TripAdvisor doesn’t advertise all the elements of the Popularity Index algorithm. It also doesn’t let us know the weighting of each factor. For example, it doesn’t tell us whether a property’s average review score or whether the total number of reviews are more important.

Revinate.com carried out a study last year and based on their data in the Bangkok market, they came up with a rough approximation of weighting: From what we can tell,

The average review score of a property counts for 85% of the Popularity Index ranking.

The total volume of reviews counts for 6% of the property’s ranking.

9% is left unexplained.

Abstract from paper;
Hotels that are listed on third-party distributors’ websites, commonly known as online travel agents (OTA), gain a reservation benefit in addition to direct sales…The study found that when the hotels were listed on Expedia, they saw an increase in reservations from their own distribution channels (that is, not through Expedia).

More on this in Module 5, Multiplied Market Presence.

OTA Rankings

Just by being on the OTA’s will help with visibility because if people are using more specific search terms such as you property name, the OTA’s will actually already have their PPC advertising geared for that. So let them take the gamble on PPC and you can just pay the known commission they charge, should you actually realise a booking. Even then some will still visit your website before making the booking giving you another chance to grab that direct booking.

Similar to Trip Advisor, the more bookings and the more reviews you get the better you will rank on the OTA websites. It’s a combination of volume and positive reviews that help calculate your ranking.

Other factors that may impact your rankings on OTA’s include:

Content Score. Most channels provide you with a content score which is an indication of how complete your profile is and the quality at which your property is presented through photos etc. This scoring will affect your ranking within their site.

Commission (the more you pay, the better your ranking). This is a feature of Booking.com and Agoda (both owned by US giant Priceline) and more recently Expedia, where you can increase commission for a targeted period in exchange for better rankings.

Deals & Promotions. Most OTA’s reward hotels that offer “deals” such as discounts based on early bookings, pre-payment or length of stay.

Cancellation rate. This is especially relevant with booking.com, who did not until recently, have a payment gateway on their site. Customers could make a booking without committing to the stay (unless the accommodation provider specifies pre-payment). As a result, it is easy for bookers to make a booking and cancel it if they find a better offer or decide to book elsewhere. The more cancellations you receive are an indication of dissatisfaction and hence down in the rankings you go.

Being on the OTA’s is a key move in increasing your online visibility and we encourage almost every property to have a presence. But more on online distribution in the next module.

Now sure, you may receive some traffic to your site as a result of the links, but more importantly the quality backlinks will help raise your google and search engine rankings in general.

HOW?

Go to www.atdw.com.au,

Check if you already have a listing

Yes, go to next step

No, create an account > sign in > Build Profile

Optimize your listing by again ensuring consistency of imagery and story.

Watch this ATDW Guide to making the most of your listing

Hack #2 – Star Ratings on Google Search Results

Having a star rating appear next to your search listing can help you stand out from your competitors. (see example below). Google uses rich snippets, a form of structured data, to create your star rating in organic search results. According to Hitsearch, 3 factors influence getting a Google star rating:

Trusted review sites

Schema markup, and

Site authority

Get these items sorted and you’ll begin to see the star ratings appear beside your organic listings.

Hack #3 Google Hotel Ads
Google Hotel Ads have in fact been around for quite a few years, and has changed its stripes a few times but still really flies completely under the radar for most independent Hoteliers.

Unless you’re a developer or some sort of IT guru, the best way to take advantage of this is to use a technology integration partner such as those listed here https://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/hotels/find-a-partner/. You may be already associated with one of these companies through your PMS or Channel Manager and the process could be quite painless.

There are number of moving parts to understand and watching the Google playlist on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yand_BRC9EA&list=PL7azzdf4x1h8VEIbjNA_49mI2taIQc_8- will go a long way to helping you understand the complexities.

But ultimately, what it means is that Google can act on your behalf just like an OTA, with 3 key benefits.

1. You can jump the que for Organic Search results leveraging off Google Maps/Local listings.
2. People can book direct straight from the local search result.
3. You have control and therefore a much lower cost compared to OTA commissions.

Below is what a Google Hotel Ad looks like.

Hack #4 – PPC Advertising Options

As mentioned earlier when demonstrating Google’s architecture, delving into the world of pay per click advertising can be fraught with danger. You are up against the big boys in the form of all the OTA’s, MetaSearch channels, TripAdvisor as well as major Hotel brands (who all have deeper pockets and bigger, better resourced teams to out compete you in this space). Before you even try to get your head around that, it is important to remember that PPC is exactly that. “Pay Per Click”. So while you may bid and win to get a “Click”, based upon what we know about travel booker behaviour, you are still a long way from securing a booking.

At the time of writing this content, a search on Google for the term “Accommodation Sydney CBD” indicates a suggested bid of $5.58. So let’s say you convert 1 in 10 clicks through to a booking, then that one booking has cost you $55.80 approx. Now let’s say for a Sydney CBD property, an average of $250/night sounds reasonable. That would mean over 25% “commission” to Google for a one night stay. When comparing that to say booking.com at 12% then the booking.com option looks more reliable and a safer option.

You can see how quickly this becomes a slippery slope in competitive markets.

The exception to the rule, is when your location is a little more remote/unknown or your product is unique. The competition for specific search terms on Google Adwords my not be so fierce, and you may be able to afford to have a dabble on it using a monthly limited budget.

For example; “Accommodation Temora” (my home town) has a suggested bid of $1.31 and “Apartments Temora” has no suggested bid or competitive scoring, which shows the big boys aren’t near as active on these search terms. So, to spend some money on advertising may well be worth it to get the traffic coming to your site and helping to avoid the OTA’s may well be worth it. We suggest trialling with a limited budget so you can only spend a set amount each week or month.

Hack #5 – Social Presence

Having a strong social presence is also another way to expand your online visibility, but brings with it a work load that needs to be considered. Facebook and Instagram are great platforms for cut through and reach, but you must think carefully about how you are going to approach social media as a tool for expanding your reach. More on this in Module #6 – Supercharged Social Presence.

Logon to the Hotel Growth Gurus Portal and download the available FRAMEWORK files.

Use the STRATEGY SELECTION TOOL to decide which frameworks to add to your MASTER HOTEL STRATEGY & Action Plan

Whilst it is important to control the reliance of OTA’s, in order to keep commissions down, OTA’s do play an important role in the online space for your property. They run with far larger budgets and far larger teams of people, with superior marketing abilities, all focussed on trying to get people to book beds in your property! Sure you’ll pay a commission, but there’s a broader impact at play other than just trying to get the right mix of direct & commissionable bookings. In fact, we’d like to suggest that you need to stop calling it OTA Commission, and start referring to it as your Marketing Spend.

A research paper written by Cornell University School of Hotel Administration titled The Billboard Effect, suggests that traffic volumes to your own website will reap the benefits from being listed on the OTA’s.

Here is the actual Abstract from the paper;
Hotels that are listed on third-party distributors’ websites, commonly known as online travel agents (OTA), gain a reservation benefit in addition to direct sales. That benefit, often called the billboard effect, involves a boost in reservations through the hotel’s own distribution channels (including its website), due to the hotel’s being listed on the OTA website. This report provides a quantitative assessment of the incremental reservations through non-OTA distribution channels received as a result of being listed on an OTA site. To quantify the billboard effect, this pseudo experiment examined the effects for certain properties operated by JHM Hotels that are listed on Expedia.com. The study found that when the hotels were listed on Expedia, they saw an increase in reservations from their own distribution channels (that is, not through Expedia). The theory behind this phenomenon is that the would-be guest gains information about the hotel from its OTA listing, but then books the room through a channel controlled by the hotel or its chain family. The study estimates the incremental reservations from listing on Expedia (not including the reservations actually made at Expedia) at 7.5 to 26 percent for the four properties in this study

So in summary, by listing on an a single OTA, this study suggests that;
a. You should obviously receive additional bookings from the OTA that are commissionable.
b. You should receive additional traffic to you direct website/channel
c. You can expect between 7.5% to 26% in increased reservations on your direct website/channel

So, it is not just the incremental transactions created on a specific external channel that is benefit. It is the broader distribution and increase in consumer awareness of your product that plays a role also. This is supported by the statistic that 60% of travel bookers will visit your direct website after finding you on an OTA at some stage during their research. And the evidence continues in follow up research.

Some Definitions;
Online Travel Agent or OTA as we tend to refer to them as, is a travel website that specializes in the online sale of travel products to consumers. Some agencies sell a variety of travel products including flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises, activities, and packages. They typically hold real-time available inventory from providers (hotels) and sell the inventory on behalf of the provider on a commission basis.

Wotif.com was an early pioneer in this space in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s with typical commission rates being at around 8-10%. Today typical commission rates are 12-15% and you even have the option to pay higher commissions to gain more prominent placement on the sites. This is what we call OTA rankings, but more on this later.

Online Review and Reputation sites came about in 2000 with the launch of TripAdvisor which is an American travel and restaurant website company providing hotel and restaurant reviews, accommodation bookings and other travel-related content. It also includes interactive travel forums. TripAdvisor was an early adopter of user-generated content. This was a game changer as people become more and more inclined to trust the opinions of real travellers and their authentic reviews, rather than all the glitzy marketing and advertising claims.

Meta Search first came into play in 2004 when Kayak was launched and soon followed by sites such as Trivago and Hotels Combined. Quite simply, a meta search website is an automated function that looks across the web to find options on flights, hotels, cars etc based upon a consumers search query. The key benefit is that rather than going to multiple websites to compare deals, a meta search site aggregates information from multiple OTA’s and branded booking engines to display comparative rates for the same rooms. It is a way for the customer to “shop” multiple sites quickly. The site then offers the functionality for the booker to be referred (by a click through) to the chosen OTA or branded site. The Meta-Search makes their revenue primarily on a ‘cost per click’ basis where the OTA’s pay for every time a potential booker clicks on their link/offer on the meta-search site.

Fast forward to today and there are now 2 dominant players in market. Expedia & Priceline.

Expedia were founded in 1996 by Microsoft whilst Priceline came along 2 years later. In Australia, close to 90% of OTA bookings are made via the two main players simply because they have been on a rampant merger and acquisition strategy since the late 1990’s. It seem that no sooner does a new OTA or Met Search launch, then it is quickly gobbled up by one of the 2 big boys.

EXPEDIA Group
Expedia own the below brands, not to mention Wotif.com, who of course were the dominant players in the Australian market until Expedia bought them in 2014.

PRICELINE Group
Booking.com and Agoda are the main sites with a presence in Australia. Booking.com are not traditional OTA’s as they only deal in accommodation rooms, not flights, car hire or other travel experiences.

The Other 10%
There are still a few sites taking some of the business away from the big 2. In some cases they offer something unique, such as Qantas (QFF points) and Entertainment Book (exclusive travel offers). Others include Not1nite, Laterooms, Ezibed and Needitnow, Qantas, Jetstar and the likes.

The reasons why consumers have this strong preference can be varied, but the below chart helps to demonstrate, and in doing so gives us all some hints as to how we can serve our potential guests better.

1. Time and effort required to set up
2. Technical skills to gain familiarity with various platforms
3. Ongoing upkeep of rates, availability and hotel information

Whilst certainly the setup process does takes time and effort, and some continuous upkeep is required to maximise your success via OTA’s, there are various tools to help you keep the day to day management of rates and inventory to a minimum.

Preparation is the key for Set Up

Each platform is different, however reasonably intuitive these days. Typically they provide a step by step process that continually prompts you and identifies which areas are yet to be completed before being able to go live. If you’ve followed our advice in module #2 and completed your unique hotel story template, this will go a long way towards helping you populate the fields required. It is also helpful if you are clear about all your terms and conditions and use the same on all channels. Having a nice set of Hotel Amenity and Room photos is also critical to your set up. See earlier information in module #3 about Photos as your images are critical in your setup and optimization on the OTA’s.

Follow your Nose for Optimization

Again each platform will continually prompt you for ways you can enhance and optimize your listing. For example booking.com has the ‘opportunities’ section that provides suggested actions for you to take, which you either ignore, postpone or adopt. So you can simply be guided by each channel as to what can help, however don’t follow their advice blindly. Read carefully and make up your own mind about what suggestions to adopt or not. Best practice for optimizing on the OTA’s is to always have great, high quality photos (preferably with people in them) and always have consistent information about your property across all the channels you are listed. (See Section 5 for OTA Best OTA Hacks)

Automation via Channel Managers

Channel Managers are far more common now than ever. A Channel Manger is a technology solution that allows you to distribute your rates and availability across one or multiple channels and have your inventory automatically update with the core allotment of your room stock you provide to the channel manager. Companies such as Siteminder, STAAH, Rategain and TravelClick allow you to update all your OTA’s at once and likewise they do so in reverse when rooms are sold. Many channel managers have also developed two-way interfaces between the Channel Manager and Property Management Systems (PMS), meaning rates, restrictions and inventory will be automated as well and reservations dropping straight into the PMS. Also, a good channel manager will push rates automatically to your own direct booking channel on your website.

How a Channel Manager Works

Images courtesy of High Level Software

Logon to the Hotel Growth Gurus Portal and download the available FRAMEWORK files.

Use the STRATEGY SELECTION TOOL to decide which frameworks to add to your MASTER HOTEL STRATEGY & Action Plan

It is becoming critical that your product is well managed across these areas in a day and age where the general public no longer takes what you have to say about yourself at face value. They will dig around in the online world to gain some form of buyer endorsement prior to approaching you for a booking/stay.

Without, giving this area of marketing, real time, you will find it increasingly difficult to compete in a crowded space.

While Social Proof is a chicken or the egg question, something vendors struggle with on a regular basis is an area very simple to get started in. By simply engaging with your guest and encouraging/directing them to go to the right places to provide feedback you will start a valuable and profitable journey if done in the right way. To maintain focus in this space always start with the end in mind, a great review by a happy guest. In order to get this review, start at the beginning of the experience, the reservation.

In reviewing the example below you may notice that there are a number of touch points, some are direct and personal while some can be completed through personalised but automated systems. However, all along the way the goal is about ensuring the guest is continually engaged with your property in a meaningful and helpful way. It is worth noting at this stage that not all guest will want to engage at all stages if at all, however the more opportunity you give to them to engage the more likely it is that you will achieve your desired outcomes, a guest who has had a great experience with your property and they are willing to talk about it in multiple forums.

It is a tool you can reference at a later date when you need to write responses to your guests on line. It can be a great memory trigger for when you need to respond to a review about an issue or service difficulty. When you are talking to a guest on line you are also talking to all of your potential guests. An honest response with an accurate positive account of an occurrence will help build your reputation considerably.
Now you have the record keeping taken care of you need to take care of the guest, remember when dealing with the issue at hand it is critical to get the response just right, if you do the guest will leave happy and hopefully commit to a review without being requested to or if a gentle request is made they should move to it in a quick and positive manner if the issue has been dealt with in the right way.

If you’re not visible on Trip Advisor and you don’t rank highly, then it’s plain and simple you are missing bookings as a result.
So the first thing is all properties just have to be on Tripadvisor without question. The second is how to improve your ranking? There is an algorithm that Tripadvisor uses to calculate the ranking which involves 85% dictated by the average review score and 6% by the total number of reviews. So in simple terms you must get plenty of reviews and maintain a good average score. (Not rocket science really)

Google/Social/OTA
Similar to above but of slightly less importance than Tripadvisor, there are many other opportunities for guests to review your property. Google is an important one simply because they are so dominant in the online space. They are prominent now and will only likely increase their dominance over time. On top of this they are connected through so many applications like Google Maps/Earth, Google Hotel Finder, Google Ads, Organic search etc. Make sure you are on Google and are getting some reviews on there.

Most the OTA’s (Online Travel Agents) have a reviewing system as does the many social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram (in one form or another). In short, when it comes to the guest experience in your Hotel, very few will know about it if they aren’t talking about it online & there’s nowhere to hide if you’re getting in wrong!

Encourage & Respond
The real question is not what platforms should I use, it is what are you doing to encourage reviews full stop (no matter the platform)? Are you just hoping they happen or are you taking some action towards it? Perhaps upon check-out you are suggesting to guests to complete a review, perhaps in a post stay email. Some properties are installing tablets or computers to allow guests to complete reviews while still in the hotel. Once you start getting reviews, you absolutely have to start responding, thanking and answering the reviews. This shows good ‘guest engagement’ and helps increase your ranking and visibility on all these sites. This is not limited to the reviews you have encouraged, but all reviews. Good, bad or indifferent. Look at this as a marketing opportunity.

Whilst you do not want to bombard your guests, ensure you remind them to “talk about you”. From a social media perspective ensure you inform your guests you can be found on Facebook. Use your Facebook page in collateral and list the link online, to keep this top of mind (even if it is subconscious). Below are some examples on how this is done in a subtle but obvious way:

Set a Rhythm
From a review perspective, we have established that we want to encourage these (warts and all). Even bad reviews can be turned around and converted into a marketing opportunity. The key is to INTERACT and ACT. Similarly to social media, include reviews on your own website. Not only is it an opportunity to have your property “endorsed”, but you also show the potential booker that you have nothing to hide. There are “widgets” available that can take care of this for you.

Interact. Ensure you respond to the reviews. Good or bad, acknowledge what has been said and offer solutions. Do NOT engage in an argument with the guest (remember, the guest is always right).

Act. Ensure the reviewer feels like you listened to their comments and has confidence you will taking action where appropriate.

Your Rhythm could look something like this:
1. Daily – monitor and respond to new comments. This means ALL comments (good or bad), within 1 business day of receiving them, wherever possible.
2. Weekly – ensure you keep a track of what department/category the comments you receive belong to. This will help you prioritise any projects or work in order of importance.
3. Monthly – Plan and execute any action required based on your guest feedback.

Explore Technology Offerings
With the ever increasing amount of sites and platforms offering reviews, it is starting to be tricky to keep a track of all the reviews. Similarly to how a Channel Manager combines multiple OTA’s and channels to sell inventory, there are now platforms available that combines reviews in one simple platform. These Review or Reputation Management platforms also offer an easy way to track and combine reviews from platforms you may or may not even know you are on. And they will keep a track of your rankings on sites where this is relevant.

Below is a list of a few of these platforms. Please note that these platforms come at a subscription cost. If you are serious about getting on top of your reviews, we strongly recommend using one of these:

Trust You

Leverages guest feedback to improve the guest experience and increases your property’s online visibility

Rategain – Online Reputaion Management (ORM)

Simplifies online reputation management for hotels and easily tracks what guests are saying

Reputami

Reputation management built for hotels and restaurants. Monitors all reviews, competitors, identifies influential guests

Win Hotel Solution

Monitors and improves your rating on different online channels

If your budget does not allow for a paid platform, the following blog article gives you some further hints and ideas on how to track your reviews and social media comments:

7 tools to track and manage your hotel’s online reputation

Communication Schedule
Then with that database it is important that we are communicating with them to remain top of mind or introduce special offers and entice return visits. Perhaps simply communicating ‘what’s on’ in [your City] is sufficient. Or setting up a periodic email newsletter to keep yourself top of mind.

Guest Recognition
With the database it is also valuable to be recognising guest loyalty. Be sure you are recognising guests that are returning even for just their second stay with you, but also look for ways to impress guest when their 5th, 10th, 20th stays occur as well. Make them feel special to cement that loyalty.

Referral Programs
Nothing better than a personal recommendation to encourage a new customer, so why not find ways to encourage and reward your guest for recommending you to a friend.

Logon to the Hotel Growth Gurus Portal and download the available FRAMEWORK files.

Use the STRATEGY SELECTION TOOL to decide which frameworks to add to your MASTER HOTEL STRATEGY & Action Plan

Killer Questions & FOH Procedure
What systems need to be established for each engagement? Are their scripts that can be developed that can help ask the right questions at the right time? Items like;
– Standard greeting and goodbye terminology
– Standard offer of assistance using specific terminology.
– Booking request questioning sequence (When are they looking to stay, How many People, etc)
Quality questions are the key when it comes to increasing sales conversion rates. They give you control of the conversation, they allow the guest to do most the talking (and feel like they are being heard) and they buy you some ’think time’ while you process their requests in line with your yield/sales strategy.

Awareness/Communication
Making sure frontline staff, have ready access to critical information such as rates, availability and historical data (such as some of the items outlined in the previous sections) is key to making the booking process streamlined. Speed of response is important, and equally giving staff the ability to respond with the right information at the right time pleases not only the guests but ensures best pricing decisions are being made.

Authority & Upselling
Making sure your frontline staff are given sufficient authority to make pricing decisions on the spot. This is especially critical over the phone as you only have a matter of seconds to convert a booking enquiry to a confirmed booking. If your staff are asked for a discount and don’t have immediate authority to apply the discount (within your guidelines of course) then, it is likely you won’t be securing that booking. Also providing the guidance on how to upsell and the encouragement to do so.

Pricing Floors & Ceilings (Frameworks & Scaffolds)
Equally, giving you team structures and guidelines to operate within, sits at the heart of any yielding strategy. So we encourage you to set up a framework for your front office staff to work from. Depending on your property, this framework may be adjusted, daily, weekly or monthly, but provide staff with a defined pricing floor and a defined pricing ceiling to operate within for given booking dates. Your PMS (property management software) can play a key role here in providing the structure required for dynamic pricing implementation.

So, step 1 is to build the database and then step 2 is to decide how you will foster the relationship with those on the list. Does it involve face to face meetings, direct mail, personal door knocking, invitations for site visits and so on. There are many ways to approach this, but in simple terms you are trying to be top of mind when accommodation needs arise.

Owning Your Patch
Having and working a database is one thing, but it’s really about taking a proactive approach to owning your immediate local area.

Have a VFR Strategy (Visiting Friends and Relatives). In most regional areas the VFR market makes up around 30% of visitor travel and a large percentage of these choose to stay in paid accommodation. This runs closely behind “Holiday” as being the major reason for travel. So, even if you are not in a typical “Holiday” destination, it makes sense to tap into this market.
Idea – Hold an Open Day and invite local residents to check it out. Put on free morning tea and a snag on the BBQ. It will get you top of mind. Present a special coupon code for local connections. Something like, “INTHEKNOW”. Perhaps you could put up a quarterly prize of a nights accommodation for any referrals provided to your business. The main thing is, connect with the locals and make sure they know about you.

Old School Direct Mail to local business houses is still a good option. Again promoting your unique product and why you are a good fit for their travellers. Why you – perhaps a red hot rate! Perhaps it’s for those that want a better product – depends on who you are and the market you are appealing to. But hitting the locals is a great place to start to build your local clientele by tapping into the VFR market.

Maximising your Location
What’s around you? Can you leverage off facilities or attractions, form partnerships and the likes? Are you near a major Hospital or medical precinct? Are you near a major tourist attraction? How does that change your marketing, and who should you be trying to meet with to foster relationships and work out win/win partnership arrangements?

For example, here’s a simple one. Let’s say there is coffee shop right near your property. Assuming you don’t do coffee yourself onsite, why not develop some free (or discount) coffee cards at that coffee shop that you can surprise your guests with as you see fit. This will drive business for the coffee shop of course and demonstrate that you are clearly supporting them. In return, you simply ask that they refer business to you for anyone asking about accommodation. Perhaps they can hold some brochures for you or even better, do up “coffee customer” special rate card. Customers of “XYZ Coffee Shop” receive 5% off the best available rate (as an example).

This is just one simple idea, but it’s just about leveraging off what’s around you. Forming partnerships and loyalty amongst your neighbourhood is a positive move.

Work with your Competitors
What? You might say. That’s right, work with your competitors. Typically, the key reason for choosing your property is location. And so when you (or your competitors), fill your property on a given day, people are still looking to stay nearby. And so when your competitors full up, wouldn’t it be nice if they recommend your property as opposed to another?

So, the way to achieve this is quite simply through having a great working relationship with them. If you are at odds with each other it is unlikely you’ll recommend each other isn’t it? A gentle way of firming this position up is to:

1. Spread the business around a handful of your competitors (don’t just recommend the one property all the time)
2. Ask the potential booker to mention that “You Sent Them”
3. Send a quick email to reception/reservations/owner each time you recommend someone to them.
5. Better still, if you have time help facilitate the booking directly with the guest on-site/over-the-phone. This will help ensure they know you referred business to them and being this helpful also may help get the guest back to you next time!!

Small Business
For smaller businesses with travel needs of themselves and their staff, the decision of ‘where to book’ often lays with the guest themselves rather than a head office or departmental function. This is either through travel allowance function or simply because they own their own business. So, the philosophy around capturing the business’ accommodation needs, requires any program to be much more informal and friendly.
There are many directions you could take with this, the important thing is it needs to be personalised and based upon relationships.

So the concept is that some of your corporate business clients you will offer (and honour) negotiated rates and rest of the “Business” segment will be subject to your publicly available ‘yielded’ rates. You may even just cater to this sector solely through advertised corporate rates. This could be managed by providing travellers with a “Corporate Rate CODE” they can use to book direct on your website booking engine.

Any efforts into this space should be clearly aligned with the demographic that best suits your hotel. Eg: 3 star motel will likely be aimed at the ‘Tradies’ market. A 4.5 star CBD property at the ‘Corporate’ end of the market.

Medium Corporates
The larger the organisation gets, the more valuable they can become to your business in terms of total potential room nights. So with the increased potential, you can afford to invest some more time and resource into this segment. Here’s a few different ways to think about developing your business accounts;

Are we getting whole of wallet from each corporate guest? That is, every time they come to our city, do they stay with you 100% of the time? If not, what would it take to get the whole of wallet?

Are we getting whole of business? That is, are their other people within the same company as our existing regular guests that also come to town, but don’t stay with you? If so, how can we broaden our reach within the company itself?

New business attraction is about finding new businesses that are already coming to town, but don’t stay with you. How do we find these companies and who do we talk to about their travel plans? Is the guest the best person to speak to or is there a booking/admin department that handles those sort of dealings.

New Projects within your city also typically garner greater accommodation demand particularly in the short term, but also can give you a foot in the door with new clients who become permanent stayers. It is important to keep your ear to the ground and be proactive in contacting the involved companies well before their accommodation needs become a reality.

In all cases, it really comes down to who is in control of the decision making and who’s ultimately paying the bill. That is the person we need to be talking to. So we must be constantly looking for opportunities to connect with decision makers so we can make high value offers to them. Building a strong base of corporate clientele who book in advance, helps to keep occupancy forward bookings higher, and opens up opportunity for yielding in the transient and online markets.

Large Corporate Contracts (Agreements)
And so, for the even larger companies with travel bookers/negotiators, it is usually about entering into a formal agreements whereby you understand the ‘whole of wallet & whole of business opportunity’ along with the desires of the company and how they want their people looked after. You then capture as much of that business as possible through a formalised, high value offer (or contract). This should be reviewed at least annually and renegotiated depending on performance. This is straight forward Key Account Management 101 (KAM). Arrive at an agreement, monitor and review, revise and re-engage.

Here’s a simple example to explain:
XYZ company has 3 people that regularly travel to your city. Executive #1 visits every month for approx. 3 nights and Executive #2 & #3 each come quarterly for 2 nights. So,
Exec # 112 visits x 3 nights = 36 nights pa
Exec #24 visits x 2 nights = 8 nights pa
Exec #34 visits x 2 nights = 8 nights pa
TOTAL anticipated Room Nights per annum = 52

You then would ask what the expected compliance on that would be, and let’s say that the staff don’t always stay at the ‘preferred’ hotel or perhaps sometimes trips have to be cancelled, so you come to an agreement that you expect say an 80% compliance on the projection. 80% of 52 = Total expected room nights of 42.

You then formulate, and offer a rate with/without inclusions that you think will attract the business, and if agreed to, you ask them to sign a simple 12 month agreement. This is not a contract that would stand up in court, just an understanding between the two parties. Then you review after 12 months and renegotiate based upon the performance of the account and the satisfaction of the guests.

It’s a great way to harness some commitment and known outcomes from your business client base.

You may, or may not, include some ‘close out’ periods where by the corporate rate offered is not available and they would revert to the BAR (Best Available Rate) of the day. This is used to preserve yielding in your peak periods. However depending on the size of the client, this condition may be waived. Basically you can build anything you like into the agreement. The key is mutual understanding, providing a valuable service and keeping an open dialogue for review and change.

If you already have some form of conference/meeting facility on site, you no doubt are already trying to tap into this market. However even without onsite conference facility you can look to maximise this opportunity for yourself. Here’s some ideas;

Keep an eye on local media to see advertisements and stories about upcoming business gatherings. Speak to the organisers about offering special rates, perhaps target some prospective attendees direct.

Speak to local clubs and event hosts about their upcoming calendar of bookings. Identify opportunities that look like attracting external travellers.

Place specials on your website or place some PPC advertising (Search Engine or Social) leading up to large events.

Monitor the demand for your property over any upcoming conference dates and use it as a yielding opportunity if you already have significant business on the books.

Create a page on your website dedicated to looking after the business conference market. This is great for SEO as well as direct appeal and information for potential bookers.

So aside from entering into a discounting war (which could be deemed a fair assumption to make in low demand periods), here are some ideas that will help bolster your underlying demand beyond the transient/walk-in guest.

VFR/Transient
As mentioned earlier the VFR (Visiting Friends and Relatives) market is a major driver of visitor nights which leads to a reasonable percentage of theses choosing to stay in ‘paid’ accommodation. We outlined earlier in section two, a strategy to tap into the locals with a loyalty offer/incentive. Aside from that though, you should probably leave the rest of this up to your marketing and word of mouth.

Geographic Marketing
Assuming that your PMS is kept relatively accurate and up to date, draw some data off the system with the aim to identify your top performing geographic areas. This should give you some clues as to where to develop your next marketing campaign. Remember the old ‘Pareto’s Principle’ (the 80/20 rule). Eighty percent of your business will come from twenty percent of your clients. So focus on what’s working and try to take it to the next level.

Packages & Experiential Marketing
For years, packaging your product with local attractions and products has been a great way to get your message out there. As a twist on this there is big trend towards what’s called experiential marketing. This takes packaging to a whole new level and really is only limited by your imagination. Check out this great article for some inspiration. https://www.factory360.com/experiential-marketing-for-hotels/. The idea is to create a unique, fun, meaningful or materially rewarding experience they’ll remember for a long time and likely tell a lot of people about it. It’s like an inside out approach. People come, enjoy exceptionally, remember, then tell or share! Let the experience do the talking (or marketing) for you.

Weddings
Not only weddings but parties, family gatherings and school reunions can all have an impact on your demand if you can manage to get in front of them at the right time. Keeping an eye on engagement announcements in local media and social platforms. Monitor hashtag activity for [yourtown] [wedding]/[engagement]/[reunion] is a great way to get the heads up. You may like to approach people direct to see if you could show them your property for them or their guests.

Large/Key Events
Keep an eye on your local calendar for key events, full stop. This should be almost weekly if not at least a monthly agenda item. Keep a calendar of these events either physically or in your PMS and ensure you are yielding your property accordingly well in advance of when these events occur. You may see opportunity within some of the events to contact the organiser direct to offer rates or arrange sponsorship deals, but typically it is more about setting appropriate pricing based upon anticipated demand fluctuations.

Equally dealing with travel agents, offering competitive (commissionable) rates, and developing these relationships can build great ‘base’ business which allows you to yield your property through easier forecasting of when demand seems strong.

How to go about this? Well, it is important first to consider the impact of how group or high volume business will affect your overall profit. Having some base business at discounted rates is good, but have too much is detrimental to revenue, revpar and ultimately the bottom line. Sure you might increase your occupancy but are you profitable?

So, make a decision about how many rooms you would like to fill with this style of business, and then start talking to Travel Agents, Tour Groups, Sporting Clubs, Social Clubs, Car Clubs and the like about coming to your region.

You also need to ensure there is a reason for the travel in the first place, so looking into some of the areas we’ve mentioned earlier in this module (conference, events, sporting occasions, tourist attractions), and really these have to be the catalyst for coming in the first place. You simply offer them a great place to stay at a great rate while they are here.

In order to capture information (data), to measure and compare, it is imperative that you collect and store this data in a systematic, secure and usable format. Many accommodation providers make the mistake of getting one or all of these components wrong. This could mean the data you are then basing your decisions on will be compromised.

So, the first step in getting closer to your numbers, is to ensure that the data you collect has ‘data integrity’, meaning it is,

Relevant

Accurate

Up to date

How do we do this? First we must decide on what we need to analyse. Later in this module we will go through in detail what we believe are minimum requirements in terms of analysis and reporting.

Secondly, we need to ensure that the information is captured consistently and accurately. If you have a Property Management System (PMS) you can capture data along the booking cycle, through the stay until point of check out.

So what information should I capture? At point of booking, you would automatically capture the guest name, rate value (presumably attached to a rate code), booking date, check in date, check out date as well as contact details. This information alone will give you enough data to measure:

Occupancy

Rooms Revenue

Average Daily Rate

RevPAR

Length of Stay

Lead times.

This information is vital for historical productivity data and future analysis in Business on the Books (BOB), Booking Curves (Pace) and forecasting reports and tools.

Other data that you can capture that may be useful for analysis:
We recommend segmenting guest data in logical groupings. Here are two further data capture points that we know will prove valuable down the track

1. Market Segments
This can be as simple as segmenting your guests into Corporate and Leisure Markets, but it may be relevant to add such Markets as Government, Conference, Wholesale, Group business and perhaps even Crew (airline).

The important thing is that you customize this to the style and needs of your property.

2. Channel Segments
By tracking the Channel from which your customer made their bookings, you will be able to determine where you need to concentrate possible promotional spend. In its simplest form channels are split into Electronic and Direct. Electronic would be anything that would come to you automatically, without someone from the property required to sell/complete the booking (eg Online Travel Agents, your own website and GDS), whilst direct refers to the rest (eg over the phone, email or in person). If your systems allow, we would suggest the following Channel segmentation:

Electronic

Brand online (your own branded website)

OTA’s

GDS (if applicable)

Direct

Telephone

Email

Desk (walk in)

Historical

Occupancy Patterns

By analysing your historical data, you can identify patterns such as Day of Week (DOW), year on year and monthly occupancy and rate variances.

Lead Time

In order to grasp when your customers book, you should analyse the lead time of your historical bookings. Historical lead time will assist with your forecasting as you will find patterns over a period of time. Lead times are simply the number of days before a stay, the booking is made. Usually it is worth looking at Day of week (DOW) patterns and monthly patterns at the very least.
Note, module 9 goes into lead time calculation further

Business on the Books (BOB)

Knowing your future holdings, compared to last year, budget and if possible what you were holding at the same time last year will greatly assist you in understanding your business. It will assist you in your forecasting as well as give you an indication on what rates you can/should charge. By capturing future rooms sold and rooms revenue by day, on a regular basis (preferably every day, but at least weekly), you will soon be able to pick patterns, and understand where your business is heading.

Booking Pace

Related to the BOB report, a Pace or Pick up report requires regular capturing of future holdings. Doing so will allow you to compare holdings for a day or period over a period of time, thus understanding the booking pace for the property. It usually helps if these numbers are graphed. See example below, which is of a hotel tracking the next 4 Tuesdays from 90 days out before staying at the hotel.

Booking pace tracking does not need to be as detailed as the example above. By regularly tracking holdings, you can compare your booking pace with a previous period, eg the same time last year. The key is to capture the data regularly (ie at a set time every time). Many PMS’s allow you to schedule reporting. If so, we recommend you schedule the same holdings report daily at a set time.
This is a more advanced use of your data, however one that most properties can benefit from immensely. The key is to at least start capturing the data so when you are ready you can build these reports out.

Future

Forecasting

Never the easiest thing to achieve, but worth it if you can achieve it with some level of accuracy. Imagine if you knew, for a fact, what your occupancy levels were going to be for the next 6 months! How would that assist you in setting your pricing?

All the above reports, in conjunction with Market intelligence such as an Event Schedule and Competitor Rate Intelligence (see Section 3) will assist you in your forecasting. Regular forecasting will not only give you confidence in pricing your hotel into the future. It will also give you as an operator, an idea of your future revenues, and will assist with managing your variable costs such as labour.

The next step would be to benchmark your property with the wider market and your direct competitors. Below are some examples that assist you with this. It is worth noting that these are examples only. Whilst we have experience with using/working with these products, there is no direct interest from Hotel Rescue with the specific providers.

Rate Shop Reports
How you set your public price, especially online, often relates to the competitor’s pricing. These days pricing can change daily or even multiple times per day. It has become nearly impossible to keep an eye on these changes manually. To do so effectively is not feasible without assistance. Thankfully there are various products that do this for you, both automatically (ie scheduled reports) and on an adhoc basis.

Rategain’s “Pricegain”, Travelclick’s “Rate360”, Siteminder’s “Prophet” and ”OTA Insight” are sophisticated products, allowing you to source rates from all sorts of electronic channels (Hotel’s own branded sites, OTA’s, GDS and even Metasearch sites). As they source data from multiple platforms, they can also offer insight into Rate Parity across channels. These can be purchased for a reasonably small monthly subscription fee.

https://rategain.com/hotel-software/hotel-rate-shopping/
https://www.travelclick.com/rate360.html
https://www.siteminder.com/channel-manager/
https://www.otainsight.com/

Expedia and Booking.com now offer their own rate shopping tools at no cost, and are a decent substitute to the paid versions. However please note, these options are restricted in that they only access rates on their own platforms.

Historical Market Intelligence
STR offers data benchmarking, analytics and marketplace insights. Participation is required by submitting performance data – at a minimum Occupancy and ADR – on a daily basis. In return the property can benchmark their performance against an approved competitive set and/or markets. The solution is somewhat restricted in regional areas where strict competitor set rules are not satisfied (see sources section on page 10), however in larger regional and rural areas, STR statistics are the go-to market benchmarking source.
http://www.strglobal.com/

Historical and Future performance data
Travelclick’s “Demand360” offers insights into historical and future performance compared to your competitive set, by segment and channel. It shows a complete picture of all booking channels, from GDS and OTA’s to brand websites and hotel direct reservations. The information is restricted to include participating properties and chains, but does include many larger chain’s data such as Marriott, Hilton and soon Accor.
https://www.travelclick.com/demand360.html

GDS data
Travelclick’s “Agency360” offers detailed, dynamic intelligence data into the GDS channel. The main feature of this tool is your own and Competitor data and detailed Agent productivity via the GDS specifically. It also features historical and future Pace data via the GDS. Cost varies across Markets but is worth investing in for properties looking at developing their Corporate GDS footprint.
https://www.travelclick.com/agency360.html

The key point to remember is that while your own data is good and can provide you with great insight and opportunity, it is not until you begin comparing your data with external benchmarks that you get a stronger feel for how you are really performing and therefore be in a position to make much better informed decisions.

Daily Reporting
In this day and age, with public pricing being dynamic, we recommend tracking the following on a daily basis:

Pricing – yours vs competitors inside current month and next month at a minimum

Pick-up – since yesterday, and a secondary time frame (eg since 1 week ago)

Holdings – daily, and summarised by fiscal periods (ie monthly and yearly)

Pace – if your reporting is sophisticated enough, track day-by-day pace

Weekly Reporting

Pricing – yours vs competitors for the next 3 – 6 months

Forecasting – in-month and next month by day at a minimum. Track your forecasting success* (see below for more detail)

Monthly Reporting

Pricing – yours vs competitors for the next 12 months

Forecasting – for the next 3 – 6 months

Historical productivity eg.

Channel

Market

Agent

Company

Rate Code

Room type

Run previous month, and Year to date (YTD) productivity numbers, comparing them to the same period last year and/or budget figures. This allows you to track the success or otherwise of your strategies.

Budgets and Targets
In order to effectively track your success, it is important you set yourself a budget as well as shorter term target. We like to encourage setting targets that always out-perform last year’s effort. Sometimes this is not possible (eg when a one off peak event occurs), but generally this should always be the goal.

Forecasting
Whilst Budgeting and Targets set your striving goals, most important of all is realistic forecasting. That means, using all the aforementioned tools, to predict, to the best of your ability how your hotel will perform (Average Daily Rate and Occupancy) by day into the future.

This forecast should be updated and tracked regularly. As a guide we suggest:

Daily forecasting for the next month

Weekly forecasting for the next 3 months

Monthly forecasting for the next 6 months

This may seem pedantic or a waste of time to some, however you will quickly come to terms with the importance of this practice. All of a sudden you will find yourself across your numbers much more than ever before. You should track your forecasting success (or sometimes lack thereof) regularly. An industry standard is a 5% variance – ie your Rooms Revenue forecast should be within 5% of the final result – within the month.

Pricing:

Pick-up:

Holdings:

Pace:

Historical Productivity:

Forecasting:

Logon to the Hotel Growth Gurus Portal and download the available FRAMEWORK files.

Use the STRATEGY SELECTION TOOL to decide which frameworks to add to your MASTER HOTEL STRATEGY & Action Plan

Sources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUT8k1_MsGQ&list=PLHpMZALWtZLc5PrigvRi_K5ljI1Ia88qP&index=3
http://www.strglobal.com/resources/glossary
http://www.strglobal.com/Media/Default/Documents/CompSetGuidelines/STR%202017%20Compset%20Guidelines/Comp_Set_and_Trend_Report_Guidelines_2017.pdf
https://youtu.be/G8p96xOnvxQ

Equally when demand is low, prices can be dropped to try and secure a percentage of the demand that is there, or perhaps dropped with the intention of trying to stimulate the market and create some travel activity and hence sell some of the perishable stock.

There are many factors at play when it comes to yielding a property. From understanding historical patterns, demand levels, knowing forward bookings, lead times and expected pick up rates as well as monitoring major events and competitor activity just to name a few.

By capturing historical statistics, watching your competitors pricing, accurate forecasting and often using a bit of “gut feel”, hoteliers can fluctuate pricing for each night, based on demand in the marketplace. For some properties and markets, this may be more variable than others. Most capital city hotels will have sophisticated Revenue Management software and dedicated Revenue Managers watching the demand (or sometimes the lack thereof) for any and every specific day 365 days or further forward. As a result the pricing of the rooms will vary greatly, and fluctuate many times in the lead up to each night. In some markets and properties the fluctuation may not be as prominent, but hoteliers would be remiss not to take advantage of increased demand and leaving money on the table.

The table above shows pricing of 9 Sydney hotels on Booking.com over a 10 day period. As you can see each hotel fluctuate rates greatly. Green highlights the highest price for each property during the 10 day period. Red is the lowest.

How should I build a base?

The amount of ‘base business’ you may require varies from property to property and market to market. In fact, most properties have a day of week pattern, suggesting that you may not need as much base business on some days as others. For example, many city locations have strong corporate mid-week demand, and maybe strong Saturdays, however Sundays, Mondays and Fridays are tougher to fill. So they may need more base business on those days than others. The graph below demonstrates this in a very simplistic way. Time of year may also have an impact (eg winter months may require more base than summer or vice versa).

It would be handy if properties could simply pick and choose the base business that they require, but of course it is not that easy. At times you may need to sacrifice some occupancy on a higher demand day, in order to secure base for a lower demand day. In the following example, the property has secured a conference that takes up 20% of the room stock over a Friday and Saturday night. Typically they would not need that many rooms of base business to ensure filling on a Saturday night, but at a decent price, it may be worth taking this business, to give you a better chance in filling the hotel on the Friday night as well.

Why should I build base

It would be very nerve racking to wait until the last minute to secure business into your property. You can do all the planning and forecasting in the world, but if you do not have any base business on the books, you are completely at the mercy of the demand in the market. If demand is lower than expected, chances are your competitors will lower their rates to see if they can secure a bigger piece of the pie. If one property drops their public rates, so will the rest. So if you build some base business into your holdings, you will be less reliant on the public prices (and more importantly demand) available to the consumer last minute, thus less exposed.

The key is to find a balance, because of course, when the demand is high, the situation above will be reversed. Competitors will lift their rates, and so will you. If you have too much base, that means you will have left money on the table, as you could have secured more business at a higher rate, typically last minute.

What type of business for base?

Typically base is built with business that has long lead times. If your property has conference facilities, attracting residential conferencing business is ideal, as spend in the hotel will typically be high. Other group business, such as external conferencing, inbound groups, domestic wholesale groups (such as bus tours etc), Crew (eg Airline or Rail crew) and wholesale allotment business are all common types of business that is typically longer lead and ideal to build base business in your property.

As mentioned above, it is possible to build base with dynamic pricing via public channels as well, by forcing longer lead times out of the customer, through discounted pricing and strict deposit and cancellation rules.

Whilst you may be lucky and secure some of the above business at higher than usual rates, typically most of the base building business comes in at lower rates. It is a win-win scenario, where the supplier (you) can build some base into your business, and the customer gets a deal!

Clearly, this can get complicated very quickly when you add more bookings and a longer window such as a week or month or year. It is really powerful to measure and record 4 typical lead times:

1. Average Lead Time for the whole year – this just gives you a feel for things and a broad bench mark to use.
2. Average Lead Time for each calendar month
3. Average Lead Time for any known seasonal peaks/troughs or major event periods
4. Average Lead Time for each day of the week ( you can often bracket this into weekday and weekend)

What can I do with this information? Many yielding decisions can and should be based on knowing booking patterns based on average lead time. You can adjust rates and rate structures for specific dates or time periods, if you know when you can expect the bulk of the bookings will be made.

Why is this important in my property you may ask?

Many properties adjust their rates to appeal to certain booking patterns. As a rule, the further out you receive a booking, the better for the business as you can plan and forecast accordingly (see “Base business” section above). So as to encourage the booker, many properties offer a discount for early bookers (Advance Purchase Rates – APR). This may be as little as 5% or $5 but often more. In return the property can enforce a stricter cancellation policy (usually no cancellation or changes allowed), to ensure they “lock the customer in”. How far out the APR is made available is dependent on the lead time of the property. If most bookings are made inside 5 or 7 days, it would be advisable to set the APR outside of 7 days.

It is important that the message of the fact that a discounted rate is made available to the booker, and the accompanying cancellation rules for the rates are clearly communicated, otherwise the customer will be none the wiser. You are trying to educate the customer that they should book further out to get the best rate.

To keep a track of trends, it is worth monitoring lead times regularly, remembering that not only do they fluctuate by time of the year, but also by day of the week.

Practical Application of Lead Times

By capturing and recording your average lead times as appropriate to your property, the next step is to actually apply the intelligence to your pricing strategy. In its simplest form here is how use of lead time should work.

If your typical (preferably mode) lead time is, let’s say 10 days, for a given period and your expected or targeted occupancy is say 100%. It stands to reason that you should be at 50% occupancy at least 10 days prior to arrival. If you are ahead of the curve, or behind the curve, this will help you make more informed pricing decisions. (More on this in section 5 under forecasting)

1. Start by identifying your opportunities. Document each event that may influence the demand in your market. This may be a conference in the area, public event or simply a holiday.
2. Get to know your own numbers. This includes historical and future holdings. Keep your data accessible and update regularly.
3. Track pick-up by subtracting any previous holdings with your new holdings.
4. Get to know your competitors, and their pricing. You can do this manually, by “shopping” their website or an OTA (like Booking.com or Expedia). Keep a record of their pricing. It may become tedious to do this manually, so thankfully there is software around that will do the shopping for you. Rateshoppers like Pricegain (by Rategain) or TravelClick’s Rate360 are example of sophisticated web based products that you can automate to shop various online channels such as OTA’s, the GDS and each brand’s own website. These of course do come at a cost. Some OTA’s do offer their own rateshoppers, at low or no cost as does Siteminder.

It is recommended that you combine the 4 reports in the same document, in effect creating a “Yield Report”. That way you can line up each day, to make it easier to track demand and opportunities.

Levers
You have 4 main levers to use when it comes to yielding
1. Rate – Increase or Decrease
2. Availability – Constrain or Release
3. Length of Stay – Minimum Restriction or Not
4. Terms & Conditions

Historical familiarity
To start with you must have an understanding and some visibility of your historical performance to enable you to make smart decisions with your rates and availability. If you have a PMS (Property Management System), extract reports which give you this data. We suggest having it readily available and preferably right in front of the person taking bookings and making rate decisions (the combined report suggested in section 4 would take care of this perfectly).

It is valuable to look back over the past 2-4 years and discover any reservation patterns that you may be able to rely on. At the very least you should have last year’s data right at your finger tips.

We suggest setting up at least weekly yield meetings with key personnel involved with day to day yielding decisions (General Managers, Front Office Managers, Sales Managers, Reservations Managers and of course Revenue Managers are often involved). Consider the past bookings in anticipation of what the few weeks ahead might bring.

When we talk about patterns, these include, but are not limited to Seasonal patterns, Day of week (DOW) patterns, Lead time patterns and Length of Stay (LOS) patterns. All of these and many more have an impact on your property’s profitability.

In a best case scenario, you have collected data through the reservations and stay process to allow you to further analyse patterns of where bookings are coming from, both from a Geographical sense, and from a bookings sense (ie which source or channel the booking came from). These factors will greatly affect your profitability in a long term sense.

What we are looking for in these patterns is how your Occupancy, your ADR (Average Daily Rate) and your RevPar (Revenue Per Available Room) behave.

Forecasting
It’s one thing to know historical performance, but another thing to be able to predict the future. And really that’s what we’re trying to do when we talk about forecasting . There are two key factors to consider when forecasting;

Forward Bookings (holdings)

Knowing your forward bookings is exactly as it sounds, simply knowing what has already been confirmed on the books. In most properties this is changing every hour, if not every minute, however your ability to have this data in front of you when making yield decision is important.

Expected Pick Up

Knowing your Forward Bookings & Average Lead Times helps you calculate your Expected Pick Up. Basically it is a formula, however doesn’t need to be calculated precisely all the time. If for a given period;

Lead Time is 10 days

Your expected Occupancy is 100% in a 10 room property

You can expect that when you are 10 days out you should have approx. 5 rooms sold and can expect to ‘pick up’ another 5 rooms in the next 10 days.

This is where forecasting becomes useful. If for example you are trying to set rates for 10 days away from now. Using the above example, you are already holding 70% occupancy. You know from your historical data that you are expecting to fill at 100% occupancy. Your average lead time for that period is usually 10 days. So right now you are sitting smack bang on your average lead time but above your expected occupancy which (expecting 5 rooms sold, already at 7). Your expected pick up is another 5 rooms which would take you to 120%, so you could become confident that you will achieve 100% occupancy.

Forecasting Example

This of course is a much simplified method of forecasting used purely to demonstrate the basic principal. Accurate and reliable forecasting can be done with a level of instinct, however best practice is certainly to build robust reporting mechanisms (often in excel or in your PMS) to delivery revenue and occupancy forecasts.

Now that you have some knowledge and confidence, yield decisions can be made. Do you place a minimum night stay restriction over the period? Do you increase rates? Do you hold back some rooms until your competitors sell out and then release closer to the date? All sorts of options open up when you have the right information in front of you.

Experiments
To get a feel for how far you can push the boundaries on rate, you need to conduct some experiments first. As with any experiment, there has to be a hypothesis. For example, if I drop my rates does it actually increase booking pace? If I increase rates does it slow booking pace or does it remain the same? So, we can set up some testing by adjusting rates but we also need a control experiment, where rates remain unchanged.

Start by picking three normal looking demand periods. Maybe a Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu in a non-school holiday period and compare it to the following or prior week. The 3 periods should be sitting at around about the same forward booking level.

One period we adjust to a lower rates and the other, a slightly higher rate, and the other we leave as normal. Then we need to monitor what happened throughout and as an end result. You need to make good records of any adjustments you make throughout and monitor them closely and make notes as you see rooms pick up (or not).

We need to do this often but this will provide us great insight as to what we should or shouldn’t be doing with rate. Note this is an advanced strategy that we can address once occupancy levels increase. It is also worth noting that these type of experiments may need to be run over and over. Just because something behaved in a certain way previously, does not mean they will again in the future.

Rate Strategy
So, once you have an understanding of everything outlined above, you need to make a decision on what is your overarching rate strategy.
Static – Rooms are always listed at the same price regardless of demand & forward bookings. This provides and easy management model, however leaves money on the table when it comes to profitability of the business.
Seasonal – A nice compromise between static & dynamic, requiring less work for management with regards to market watching and rate manipulation. Not suited to all property types, however can be implemented to a degree in most properties in combination with some market watching and semi-dynamic rate offerings.
Dynamic – Clearly the more involved and complex of the three, but brings with it the most reward and improvement to the bottom line, helps owners to maximise potential of their asset. There are many forms that a dynamic rate strategy can take and it will be different for every property.

As suggested above, a mix of the above strategies would often be the recommended way to go.

Day of Week pricing
When you track other hotel’s pricing and watch market demand over a length of time, patterns often form. Day of week (DOW) fluctuations is one very common pattern. Many hotels have a spike in demand on Saturday night. Ensure you set your price accordingly. Many hotels also encounter higher demand midweek, especially if they are in a location around lots of corporate business. Of course each property’s demand patterns vary. We encourage each property to adjust their rates accordingly for higher demand days. Of course each individual day can, and should, be adjusted on its own merit.

On lower demand days, it may also pay off dropping price. *WARNING* This is not always recommended though. Some days may see low demand, yet a drop in price may not turn on more business. As a rule, leisure customers do react better to lowered pricing whilst corporates often don’t. The effect price has on demand is often referred to as “rate sensitivity”.

Rate Tiers & Rate Manipulation

If adopting a seasonal or dynamic rate strategy it can be helpful to create a “Rate Tier” for your property. Most properties have what is called a “Rack Rate” which is their top line rate to charge, but is rarely achieved. So starting with that concept as a bench mark, we suggest setting your “Rack Rate” and then creating tiers below that level. Sometime just 3 tiers is appropriate other times 5 tiers or more can be adopted. Example below

This is a much simplified example however can work effectively. A more detailed version with more tiers could be implemented to provide a wider selection of rates.
This would need to be applied to each room type and preferably printed up for display in the office/reservation area. The best delivery of a tier pricing structure is through a good PMS solution which helps to automate a lot of the work

NOTE: There may be some cases where a Rack Rate creates an unnecessary “rate ceiling” on your property. It is advisable that your strategies and systems are flexible enough that you can exceed rack rates if circumstances allow.

Fully Dynamic (flexible) Pricing Strategy
Rate tiers are an easy way to yield your property, but it can be proven that even greater gains can be made through a less structured approach. That is, using the above example, if demand is reasonably strong but you are not 100% confident you will book out, you elect not to increase your rates to the next tier and hence potentially miss the revenue increase. However if using flexible pricing you may add just 2 or 3 or 4 dollars to the rate and still sell out which effectively still gives you an increase in revenue. When you multiply that out over all your room stock and 365 days a year the difference between tiered pricing and flexible pricing can be great.

Automated Rules
To help with your pricing decisions, many PMS’ have rule based functionality that automate all this for you. Often they are set up with rules like:
If occupancy is under/over certain ? % , then reduce/increase rates by $fixed dollar amount / fixed%
There are multiple scenarios and rules you can create dependent upon the variables available. Usually the variables are:
Booking Range (eg next 0-3 days, 4-28days, 28days++)
Day of Week
Room Type

There is much we can learn from the automated systems, but whether you actually rely upon them or not is not the point. You could create similar rules for your property to follow regardless whether your PMS can do this already.

Below is pro-forma you could use;

Taking Action
Clearly it is our preference that properties adopt a dynamic pricing strategy to maximise the opportunity in front of them each day. However regardless of how daunting this may (or may not) seem, we simply encourage you to get started with making some changes. The sooner you begin changing and trying to ’move with the market’ the sooner you will begin to learn and gain a stronger feel for the market.

The key to yielding is confidence, and confidence comes from ‘doing’, so get started!