Rooms are perishable commodity and every hotel owner and general manager dreads missing out on reservations and loss of revenue. Hotels today are willing to try every single available platform to ensure maximum exposure and a guaranteed full house.
Online travel agents or popularly known as OTA’s by hoteliers and are considered as a “necessary evil”. Hotels understand that it is pointless to work with an OTA if their property shows up the 10th or 12th page or 50th out of 100 hotels in their city. So every hotel today has developed a online strategy, and a close working relationship with OTA market managers to ensure a spot on first page. OTA offer different packages in terms of listings and hotels keep bidding on these to ensure a healthy visible spot.
The more channels hotel has to manage their reservations, the greater the risk of over-bookings and rate parity. This can be very costly especially during busy season, also more the channels, more time and resources are required to continuously monitor the extranets to ensure availability and rate updates. For this reason, it is very important for a hotel to stay on top of the availability that is being allocated to a OTA channel. Hotels face a ongoing challenge to ensure they meet all complex requirements of this distribution game to ensure a continuous flow of reservations.
Channel manager is one such tool, that not only avoids overbooking but also gives hoteliers a direct connection to OTAs and CRS systems, meaning rate and inventory uploads are automated and acquiring new reservations onto system is both easy and cost effective. Hotel can quickly and efficiently manage room rates, availability and restrictions across all connected internet distribution sites.
mycloud channel manager allows you to maximize your revenue by increasing your distribution and driving more OTA bookings. It helps reduce costs and time spent updating rates and inventory.
Distribution dynamics are slowly shifting , and days are getting darker for the OTAs, more and more bookers/travelers are beginning their travel searches on metasearch engines. Metasearch engines offer cheaper distribution channel and an increased opportunity to up sell to travelers, on top of that direct relationships allow hotel brands more intimacy and brand engagement with the traveller. This new rise in distribution will allow hotel brands to exploit their stronger bargaining hand to haggle over commissions with OTAs and drive down distribution costs.
Metasearch offers a better search experience and makes it easier to consistently find the lowest prices available online. Most metasearch engines offer seamless booking for hotels, with this rise in new search channel, distribution line is getting blurred between metasearch and OTA for many travelers and it’s the OTAs who stand to lose
I will cover more information on metasearch in next article.
About mycloud
mycloud is developed and promoted by Prologic First– a hospitality technology innovator and a leading international hospitality IT solutions provider. Prologic First is a group of companies that develops and internationally markets integrated software solutions for the hospitality sector. Prologic First software solutions are in use at more than 1300 sites in 35 countries. Professionals formed Prologic First more than a decade ago with extensive experience in developing and deploying hotel IT solutions. For more information visit www.prologicfirst.com.
Media Enquiries:
Deepak Chauhan, Phone +1-415-390-5039, Email: deepak@mycloudhospitality.com
About The Author
Deepak Chauhan
Deepak Chauhan is responsible for marketing and positioning of “mycloud” platform and is a veteran in the hotel software industry with over 25 years’ experience giving him a strong understanding of the product requirements in the industry. He has very rare mix of working in operations of various hotels and chains for over 10 years and then co-founding a software product and service company, servicing 5 star hotels and chains for 14 years.
Deepak has led the development and marketing of cloud based hospitality systems to meet the specific, business objectives of small and mid-size properties across the globe and has worked closely with a diverse group of hoteliers and hotel technology vendors.
