The Athentics & Booking Booster Blog

Channel Management empowers hoteliers

Peter Carlsen — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:20:37 +0000

I often get the sense that too many hoteliers still look at Channel Management as JUST a timesaver, but nothing could further from the truth. Effective Channel Management is much more, and could empower the hoteliers to increase performance immediately.

It’s all about managing a central repository of inventory, no more micro managing channels. Channel Management is the only way to truly re-enforce rate parity and measure the performance of current OTA partners and building a better channel portfolio that offers more return.

Channel Management puts the hoteliers in the driver’s seat, actively controlling the inventory and the rate strategy and this will increase the good will with the OTAs’. The direct resultwill be a better OTA ranking, more rooms sold and better yield.

In short Channel Management will:

Simplify your distribution
Optimise your revenue
Tailor your online distribution
Increase your OTA rankings
Streamline your web presence
Future proof your business

All the serious OTA’s measure the hotels every single day of the week by screen scraping their web presence, checking rates, availability and yield ability. The Properties are weighed and measured by their performance on the web on more than 100 parameters and the result generates their ranking on the OTA listings.

Using channel management is key to selling rooms efficiently and with the highest possible margin.

I could go on..

Posted in Channel Centric Tagged: 3rd party distribution channel, channel management, channel portfolio, distribution channel strategy, hotel channel management, hotel channels

What defines a good hotel web presence?

Peter Carlsen — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:09:19 +0000

A hotel web presence should be easy to navigate, too often we find hotel using an outdated Flash frontend that takes ages to load are struggling to be read by search engines. We are also familiar with that annoying progress bar across our screen and once there it not at all what you expected, almost all the images are tiny little stamps size images that offer you very little insight into what the hotel offer. Often you also find there is a disconnection between the booking engine and the website, it almost like an appendix that is disconnected from the rest of the site. So choose the right CRS is key to the success of any hotel property today.

But properly the biggest “crime” by the hotel management in the lack of updating your booking engine, keeping in sync with the inventory and rates you offer the Online Travel Partners (OTA’s). The OTA thrives on this and that is why they have such large influence on many hotel properties. today. It is key that you connect the dots so to speak and ensure that booking engine is updated via your distribution tool, you channel manager.

Booking Booster is offering not just one, but has certified connections to a number of different CRS providers as part of our portfolio. Innovative companies like: Web Hotelier, DirectWithHotels, ITS Magellan, Globalred and Globekey.

Posted in Hotelier Marketing, Peter in the BB Diary room Tagged: DirectWithHotels, Globalred, Globekey, hotel web presence, ITS Magellan, Web Hotelier

Quality images convert more business

Peter Carlsen — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:08:46 +0000

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.

Posted in Peter in the BB Diary room Tagged: flickr, hotel images, hotel search

Cloud Technology for hoteliers too

Peter Carlsen — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:21:52 +0000

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.

Posted in Peter in the BB Diary room Tagged: Cloud Technology for hoteliers

Boost Bookings with affiliate marketing

Peter Carlsen — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:39:35 +0000

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.

Posted in Affliliate Marketing

Customer loyalty = more profit margin

Peter Carlsen — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:55:09 +0000

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.

Posted in Hotelier Marketing, Social Media Impact Tagged: dansker media

How far into the future is it viable to update?

Peter Carlsen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:58:49 +0000

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.

Posted in Channel Centric Tagged: booking booster use, contract periods channels, hotel channel management

The channel management funnel effect

Peter Carlsen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:13:30 +0000

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

Posted in Channel Centric Tagged: booking booster, channel management funnel

Expand your channel portfolio

Peter Carlsen — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:34:56 +0000

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

Posted in Channel Centric Tagged: 3rd party distribution channel, channel portfolio, distribution channel strategy, hotel channels

Crazy and kinky hotel rooms

Peter Carlsen — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:58:14 +0000

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.

Posted in Peter in the BB Diary room Tagged: crazy and kinky hotel rooms, hotel design