Hoteliers need to understand and manage hotel booking channels, which can affect revenue, room distribution, and guest experience.

In this blog, we will specifically discuss hotel booking channels starting from their meaning, why they are important for your hotel, and strategies for optimizing it.

What are Hotel Booking Channels?

Hotel booking channels are platforms used by hotels to offer rooms to guests. In general, these booking channels can generally be divided into several categories, including:

• Direct Booking: Guests book a room via the mobile application or website hotel.
• Online Travel Agencies (OTA): Online booking platforms such as Agoda, Booking.com, and Expedia.
• Metasearch Engines: Specialized search engines for comparing prices such as Skyscanner or Trivago.
• Global Distribution Systems (GDS): A global distribution system used by travel agents to access hotel and airline inventory.
• Social Media: Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok can be used to accept the booking.

Each channel has a different operational model and cost structure, as well as advantages and disadvantages depending on the hotel’s sales strategy.

Why are Booking Channels Important for Hotels?

Expanding Market Reach

Using multiple booking channels allows your hotel to reach a larger market than just focusing on one channel.

With this, you can also reach various guest segments, from local travelers to international tourists.

Increase Hotel Visibility

Visibility is the level of ease with which a business can be found and accessed by potential guests. Optimizing this visibility will increase your hotel’s chances of winning the competition.

Booking channels such as OTA and Metasearch have a large number of users every day. Registering on these platforms will help your hotel to be visible to more potential guests.

Increase Booking Conversion

Being on good booking channels can directly increase booking conversion rates. Guests tend to choose platforms they know and trust.

For example, many candidates prefer OTAs because they can compare various hotel options on one platform, see reviews, and get guaranteed bookings.

This makes guests feel more comfortable and safe when carrying out transactions.

Collecting Customer Data for Marketing Strategy

Across multiple booking channels, it gives you access to valuable customer data such as names, emails, booking trends, and guest reviews.

Hotels can leverage this data to understand guest behavior, their preferences, and travel trends.

With this information, hotels can design more personalized marketing strategies and target the right customers through appropriate campaigns.

How to Increase Revenue with Booking Channel?

Know Your Audience

First of all, you certainly have to know who your target market is. You can build guest profiles to get more clear insights.

This guest profile can include information such as, which guests are most likely to choose your hotel?, what do they like and dislike?. and how do they book?

With this, you can create the right strategy to maximize bookings across all channels.

Use More Than One Booking Channel

To reach more potential guests, you can utilize more than one booking channel. For example, you can use the hotel’s official website and register on several OTA or metasearch platforms at once.

Connecting across multiple booking channels at once will increase your hotel’s chances of getting more bookings.

Manage Your Guest Reviews Well

Previous guest reviews play an important role in attracting your potential new guests. Therefore, you must be active in responding to reviews, both positive and negative, in a professional manner.

Positive reviews can be testimonials that attract the attention of your potential new guests.

Meanwhile, the way you handle negative reviews well can show that you care about the satisfaction of each guest.

That’s the discussion of this blog. By utilizing various booking channels, you can optimize revenue opportunities in your hotel business.