With OTAs charging commissions as high as 15-30%, a good book direct strategy should become the backbone of all your hotel digital marketing activities. Not only does a hotel direct booking strategy helps gain back market share from OTAs, it also helps in increasing the profitability of running the hotel business.

This article will guide you through at a step-by-step approach to increasing direct bookings for hotels & resorts.

What are the 4 types of hotel bookings?

Strictly speaking, one can book a hotel in 4 different ways.

1. Walk-ins
2. Online through direct channels(website),
3. Online Travel Agencies(OTAs)
4. Traditional b-2-b travel partners or agencies.

While the first 2 types of booking mechanisms are beneficial for the hotel as it does not include paying commissions. The latter 2 options work in a commissions model. The above 4 types of bookings can also be classified as direct & indirect bookings.

What is direct booking?

Direct booking encompasses hotel reservations that bring in customers without having to pay commissions to any third party. For e.g., if a user calls up the property, makes an inquiry & subsequently does a bank transfer to make a reservation for a particular date can be termed as a direct booking. Likewise, if a user visits a website & books through the booking engine provided by the hotel website, it is also termed as a direct booking. Needless to say, if a customer walks into your property & directly reserves their room that too is a direct booking.

Why is direct booking important?

A hotel is a business that serves its customers & in doing so makes a profit out of it. In running a hotel business owners need to keep an operational workforce along with a sales & marketing team.

Now in case of a new reservation, say for e.g. a room night charge for a property is $100. After a reservation is made, $30 has to be paid up to an agent who made the sale for the room. That’s a 30% loss in revenue that the hotel business is making. Instead when a customer makes a direct booking, the hotel can keep the full $100. Thus giving the hotel an opportunity to retain its revenue & maintain a profitable business.

It is in the best interest of the hotel to reduce this commission as much as possible. That is precisely the reason why direct booking is so important to run a profitable hotel business. Not only that, having the full money going into its pocket, the hotel can actually work towards giving a guest a superior experience.

What is a Book Direct Strategy?

The strategy that a hotel or resort employs to get direct bookings through channels like website, walk-ins & phone calls is termed a book direct strategy. Any reservation that a hotel or resort is able to complete without having to give any commission to other third parties can be looked at as a direct booking. The strategy involved in getting such bookings is what a book-direct strategy is all about.

How to increase direct bookings for hotels & resorts?

There are various ways in which direct bookings can be increased for hotels & resorts. A few are listed below.

• A website through which one can directly reserve rooms at your property.
• Marketing your hotel on social media to build awareness about it among your target audience.
• Using Google My Business page to update rates such that users searching through Google Hotel Finder can find your property & book directly from there.
• Using SEM & SEO to make sure your hotel website appears for the keywords when users are searching for places to stay at.
• PPC & Display advertisements to drive more users to your website.
• Loyalty programs to encourage direct bookings
• Exclusive Promotional Offer that is valid only on direct bookings through the hotel website.
• Strategic local business alliances to increase direct bookings.
• Maintaining a CRM to utilize the data & personalize communication with guests who can become repeat customers. Even if the customer was first acquired through an indirect channel, personalized communication can encourage them to come back to your property through a direct booking channel.

Direct Booking Strategies for Hotel

Increase direct bookings for hotels through the Official Website

The #1 technique of generating direct bookings is to own the channel through which one can reserve rooms at your hotel. That happens through your website.

There are various factors that need to be considered when designing your hotel website. Remember to focus more on function than on design.
Here’s a checklist of things one should remember when building up a hotel’s website.

1. The website needs to load extremely fast. Check out this tool called Page Speed Insights by Google which shows various metrics of a website loading.
2. Make sure the website offers an equal user experience on both mobile & desktop versions.
3. Remember to have great-looking photographs & videos of your property. I created a guide to use video to market your property. It may be worthwhile to look at it & understand how videos can be incorporated into marketing your property.
4. Tie up with a booking engine through which a guest can directly book a room at your property.
5. Make sure to have relevant policy information clearly labeled on the website such that a guest may check it before they make a decision to reserve.
6. Remember to highlight the benefits of booking directly through your website rather than making a reservation through an OTA channel.
7. Clearly mention details of contacting the property. That is phone number, email address, social profiles, etc.
8. Real-life testimonials of customers.
9. Easy to read copy to understand why your hotel should be the preferred choice by a probable guest.

The above list is just a checklist of the most important things a hotel website should be having if book direct strategy is something that the owners consider a priority. With time as the hotel management sees this direct booking strategy work for them, there are a lot many things that the website would need to integrate for even better results.

Choosing the right booking partner to propel your direct booking strategy

Choosing the right booking partner for your hotel is crucial for the success of your book-direct strategy. There are a variety of booking partners out there in the market. Make sure to choose a partner which is registered with Google as an official partner. It will help you get started with all the best practices. You can check this page by Google which lists all the official partners of Google.

There are a total of 246 Google Partners. Although there are organizations offering booking engines that are beyond the official partners’ list, depending upon the individual hotels’ preferences you would need to choose a booking partner. 1 key point to consider when choosing a booking engine partner is how well it integrates with the rest of the hotel systems which are already in place.

Local Search Optimization alignment with book direct strategy

How can local search optimization help in a hotel’s direct booking strategy? Let me cite an example to showcase the importance of local optimization.

The other day I asked my brother how he booked a hotel in Varanasi. He mentioned that he first went to Google & searched for hotels. I questioned him did he not go to any OTA site like Booking.com or Expedia.com? He remarked, NO. He explained, Google has a new ‘place’ where all hotels in Varanasi were listed. From there he visited the hotel websites, called them to check everything & finally made a booking directly through the hotel website.

What my brother was referring to was Google Hotel Finder. When we search for hotels in a destination, Google in its local pack will surface hotels based out of that particular location.

Hotels can start showing up in the local pack if their Google My Business(GMB) page listing is optimized. By incorporating the rates in GMB you can also start showing hotel rates in this listing offered by Google.

This is a great tool offered by Google which is often underutilized that can boost your book direct strategy. Follow the best practices of optimizing GMB & you shall see increased traffic on your website coming from this local channel.

Local Business-to-Business Alliances

When we think of a direct booking strategy, local business-to-business alliances can be a great way to increase direct bookings. This is what a customer of mine did to increase the hotel offering when someone books directly.

The property general manager tied up with a local restaurant nearby & offered guests 15% off when they go to the restaurant. The restaurant wanted more customers, the hotel wanted to package a greater value deal for their guests. By setting up a strategic alliance, both the restaurant & the hotel cross-pollinated their marketing efforts which were in alignment with their book direct strategy.

Depending upon the type of customer your hotel caters to, you may want to start building local alliances. Below are 2 such examples of local strategic partnerships that can help your property with a better book direct promotional offer.

Partner Type	Benefit
Travel Photo Teacher	Get in touch with a local spa that can collaborate with your hotel for in-room spa services or you can offer a special price for hotel guests if they end up visiting the spa. That way, you can package a unique spa package in your offering to your guest upfront when they are trying to book the hotel
Relax at the Spa	Get in touch with a local spa that can collaborate with your hotel for in-room spa services. You can offer a special price for hotel guests if they end up visiting the spa. That way, you can package a unique spa package in your offering to your guest upfront when they are trying to book.

Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are a great way to make your guests feel special. There are various kinds of loyalty programs out there. I am in no way an expert in loyalty programs. But if I put myself in the shoes of a guest, I know how I have felt special when I revisited a property & they gave me extra perks just because I was enrolled in their royalty program for return guests.

These 2 resources can be of help when you start to think about incorporating loyalty programs for your hotel to increase direct bookings

1. https://hoteltechreport.com/marketing/loyalty-rewards
2. https://www.mews.com/en/blog/hotel-loyalty-programs

Encouraging guests to leave a positive review

Better reviews on review sites can directly help in increasing direct bookings for the hotel. A research paper published in the year 2012 shows that if a hotel increases its review scores by 1 point on a 5-point scale (e.g., from 3.3 to 4.3), the hotel can increase its price by 11.2 percent and still maintain the same occupancy or market share. With the above metric in mind, it is critical for a direct booking strategy to include a portion of the efforts in review marketing. Hotels should promote among its guests to leave reviews on various review sites like TripAdvisor, and Google Business Page.

Social Media & its relationship with book direct strategy

Social media plays a critical role when a hotel tries to increase its revenue using a direct booking strategy. Let’s take an example.

Person A visits a property. Has a wonderful time at the property & uploads a photograph tagging the property’s Facebook page. The property immediately gets a notification that some person tagged its Facebook page.

What happens when a happy customer tags your property? Your brand surfaces in a closed circle of the person tagging your Facebook page. Friends & family who are connected with person A on Facebook, get to see your property’s mention in their post. That way you are actually able to gain organic visibility in a closed circle which otherwise would have been very difficult to achieve.

Friends of person A can visit your Facebook page, and put in a like to get updates from it. If you have your website linked to your Facebook page, they may also end up visiting your website. Although it may not be that someone who navigates to your website through the Facebook page will continue to reserve a room at that point in time, your hotel at least gets increased brand visibility.

That is why it is important to be active on social media because users may end up coming to your page to see what is happening at your property. If the content on the Facebook page is engaging enough, users might also be nudged to complete a booking or at least start a plan to travel to your location thereby increasing your chances of getting a direct booking completion.

In today’s day, video communication has become an instrumental tool used by many a hotel to promote themselves on social media. I had written a complete guide to video marketing for hotels which can be helpful if you plan on starting video marketing. This article lists more than 20+ ideas to use video for your hotel marketing.

I myself have worked with the most luxurious hospitality brands in India to create social video content for hotels. JW Marriott Kolkata used video as a medium to communicate its promotions which helped it solidify its position among the netizens of Kolkata.

How can building a brand help in increasing direct booking for hotels?

A brand-building activity goes a long way in establishing your brand in a target market. Let me give an example to illustrate this point.

JW Marriott Kolkata does a lot of brand-building activities throughout the year. From organizing events to PR launches to video marketing. What all of this culminates to is audiences searching for ‘JW Marriott Kolkata’ in Google search. When someone searches for it, the user is shown a sponsored search result by JW Marriott Kolkata followed by the organic listing of the hotel. This way the first 2 places of the search ranking are dominated by the brand itself, thus making users directly visit the website rather than making a user go to an OTA channel. (See the image below which illustrates the point stated in this paragraph).

This activity of capturing as much web traffic as possible which is directly searching for the brand enhances the results of a book direct strategy. Yes, it is true that some ad cost is incurred while running such paid search campaigns, but that is marginal to what the hotel had to pay if the user booked through a 3rd party site like an OTA.

Conclusion

The hospitality industry has gone through a massive shift in recent times. From OTAs dominating the booking space to complete shutdown due to the pandemic. From entrants of new players like AirBnb to the rise in awareness among hotel management of the importance of having a great book direct strategy. The key point to remember is that the direct booking strategy is an extremely long-term vision. Hotel owners & management have to measure the outcome of their strategy QoQ & YoY to understand what is working for them & what should be adjusted to increase the number of direct bookings for the hotel.

If you feel you need any help in understanding how you should start your direct booking strategy email me with your concern. I shall try to provide you with the best guidance on how you can go about starting the direct booking journey for your property.