June 15, 2009
I have always been a great advocate of using Flickr. It offers great possibilities for hoteliers too, easy access and ability to upload those all important quality hotel images, tag them and before you know it, your property appears in the search engines with all the wonderful images that makes conversions more likely. Great images are key to selling your property. Especially if your property is on a holiday destination, then it is a must have!
Josiah Mackenzie from The Marketing Strategies Blog can tell you much more about the opportunities.
April 28, 2009
We are keen on hoteliers exploring the various tools available on the internet and there are so many great tools out there in the great Internet cloud.
Google Apps for Business – including Google email and Google documents, even try Google Calendar – you can use public calendars for sharing special events and deals at your hotel. Or, you can use a private calendar internally with your staff..
TeamWork – Manage online projects and collaborate with others online.
Present.ly – “Private Twitter for business”
Freshbooks – Create invoices online, send by email or mail, and accept payment with PayPal.
Batchbook – Small company CRM with task lists and mailing functions.
MailChimp – Email newsletter software that, unlike most, offers a pay-as-you-go plan.
Survey Monkey – Create easy online surveys for quick customer research.
Box.net – Backup and share files online.
Get out there and explorer the possibilities of cloud technology.
January 26, 2009
We have just ventured into a close partnership with Affilired and their Hotel Affiliate Networking platform as part of our longterm commitment to provide a complete marketing package. We will be annoucing some packaged deals soon on the Booking Booster network, essentially a complete CRS/Channel Management/Affiliate Marketing experience.
So how will this help your property you might ask?For starters it will instantly increase bookings for and not just that, it will actually drive more trafic to your own CRS or booking engine, so these new bookings will be without the OTA commisons,you will have to pay a commision fees to the affiliate, those will vary depending on who you are volumes etc, but a a rule of tumb 10-15%.
But there something here that is very important you should not overlook. The key is that Affiliate Marketing enhances your own brand and not the OTA’s. So where you have repeat business you will find that now your customers have now become familiar with your direct webprence and booking procedures, chances are that you will have more repeat business, both in the short- and long-term, thereby increasing your ROI.
A great loyalty program will help you stimulate results . Lets talk more about loyalty programs soon.
November 6, 2008
Hoteliers should be focusing more on implementing web strategies to increase loyalty with customers, As the race for influencing and retaining consumer evolves, what creates “loyalty” is the big question. Loyalty is such a buzzword these days in an era when it doesn’t really exist in the online travel world. Points systems can make you more likely to shop with a singular brand, but more often than not, customers need to be won at every sale. A hotel social Media strategy needs to be put in place, alongside with a clever off-line marketing strategy to incentivize clients to remain loyal to the brand. For individual property managers the brand awareness is not enough, you need to great a sense of belonging, even building a closer more personal relationship to their clients. There are several ways to do that will enable you to create more and more repeat business. We will be taking a look at this area of end possibilities over the coming months.
October 3, 2008
One of the key areas that Channel Managers have had to overcome is the variation in periods you can update a specific channel. As a rule of thumb you can never update further than your current agreement with a specific channel. Some channel managers have a simple remedy for that, they only update between 30-60 days into the future. Well this is something that we took a strong view at the outset when building our interface.
So here is how we deal with this. With Booking Booster you can update up to 12 month into the future, this allows you to keep up to date with season rates too. How do we do this, you might ask, here is we do it. When updates hit the channels beyond the period agreed, we throttle the updates. You might have updated 12 month ahead, using the Booking Booster worksheet.
But the updates are actually only are done for the months that are allowed by the channels. Each property has their own dedicated Booking Booster Acount Manager and they monitor these things. When agreements are extended, we automatically deploy a “resubmission” of what is already stored in the Booking Booster application.
We boost your inventory so to speak. We believe in intelligent updating, with less limitations.
October 3, 2008
If you are looking for a really simple way of describing the benefits of channel management, perhaps this could help?
Learn about how you can benefit from the funnel effect
September 26, 2008
There are hundreds of 3rd party distribution channel sites available on the internet, our focus is not only on premium sites that carry most of the traffic such as Booking.com, Hotel.de, Expedia, Hotels.com,Priceline, Venere, etc.,
We believe that our clients can get the most return on investment for their distribution channel strategy if they are allowed to utilise the relationship they have build up with existing website agents over time and introducing the hoteliers to new innovative web portals they where not aware existed. These new additional channels could potentially increase not only their turnover but their profit margin and that is what every hotelier aims for. >> Find new channels now
September 26, 2008
Ever want to sleep suspended in mid-air, stay in a barn loft or live out some other strange fantasy you’re afraid to tell anyone? If you can think of it, chances are someone has created it. From the artistically painted to elaborately decorated, here are eighteen more unusually artistic, crazy and kinky hotel rooms from around the world. Ever stay in one of these? Be sure to describe your experience in a comment below! If you’re new to the site be sure to check out these.
September 26, 2008
Ever felt you could not really follow what all the big agents’ websites are up to??? I have quite an extensive career in the hotel industry and I have been around and seen how the Channel Management phenomenon has progressed and evolved, or should I say blossomed.
Our own Booking Booster Channel Manager is to me an achievement in it self, making something so complicated so accessible is a monumental leap forward for the industry, still to this date not beaten!
A majority of the channels in the hospitality haven’t done anything really to make channel management and web services accessible; something that is in reality in their own interest. I mean, why would any agent object to offering their product on a Channel Manager? The Channel Manager will not only instantly increase the amount of rooms the individual agents are allotted, it will also make life for the hoteliers so much easier.
September 26, 2008
A new study, conducted in October by comScore and The Kelsey Group, found that online, consumer created reviews have a big impact on prospective buyers. The researchers said 24 percent of those who eventually pay for local services such as restaurants, hotels and automotive shops read online reviews before making a choice.
