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The industry has observed a major shift from basic inventory management to a strategic marketing approach. And, the hospitality experts who learned to evolve with the shift became the big players. However, a huge part of the industry now relies on modern-day hotel management methods.
Find out the latest hotel revenue management strategies in 2019 that hotels, big or small, must follow for optimized revenue growth.
- Target the Right Market and Segment it
You need to know your market thoroughly if you want to manage your hotel business successfully and increase hotel revenue. Assess your hotel’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to decide the hotel’s unique selling points. Which types of travelers should your hotel target? Solo travelers, business travelers, families, corporate events? Based on these insights, identify your target market, segment it, and build your customer profile.
- Online Reputation Management to Increase Sales
Before booking a hotel, the first thing guests check is its reviews on different sites like TripAdvisor, MakeMyTrip, etc. This is why it is extremely important for hotels to monitor customer reviews across online channels to build a positive reputation and attract more guests.
- Competitor Rate Analysis
You can use various analysis tools that help you determine the rates your competitors are offering. You can use the reports to compare your current pricing strategy with your competitors’ and set the best price for each room with 24X7 dynamic pricing and eventually increase hotel bookings.
- Develop OTA Hotel Strategy
OTA hotel bookings are valuable for every hotelier looking to maximize hotel revenue and improve hotel business. If you want to maximize your OTA hotel bookings
, take time to analyze the bookings you get through them– where are your maximum bookings coming from? Are they local bookings or foreign bookings? These insights will help you understand where your prime focus should be – local or global – and develop an OTA strategy around it
- Improve Hotel’s Website Functionality
Your guests love to see their favorite hotels advance with technology. So, make sure your website is mobile-optimized and loads instantly on all devices. Also, you also need to ensure that the pictures display correctly, all the buttons are fully functional and the call to actions are clearly visible on the website.
An automated revenue management system helps create a fully optimized and highly functional website, which can easily drive direct bookings to your hotel’s website & booking engine by providing a seamless booking experience. That means you’ll save money on OTA commission.
- Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Since more than half of the online bookings are made on a smartphone or a tablet, it has become imperative for you to make your hotel website mobile friendly. Simply put, if you want to maximize hotel revenue, you need to have a mobile-ready website. If you don’t optimize your hotel website for mobile, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to improve your hotel business.
- Channel Cost and Optimization
Put the channel costs to the best use. Analyze the type of customer a particular channel attracts. Collect data based on date, location and booking density, and ensure that proper channel management is in place. It is a key requirement of giving your hotel revenue a boost.
- Focus on Data Analytics
Analyzing past and current data is crucial since it helps in figuring out which strategy is best for your business. Hotel data analytics help in finding out the booking patterns which play a major role in decision-making. This is amongst the proven hotel revenue management strategies that guarantee optimal revenue management.
However, extracting all the historical data, going through the details and creating reports is an utterly hectic task and requires expertise. Hence, you can use a hotel revenue management software which will help you optimize your hotel’s performance with accurate business performance analytics.
- Improve Forecast Accuracy & Profitability
Forecasting is a critical function that helps in determining demand projection. The accuracy of forecasts depends on the analysis of the past data collected at various intervals. Forecast accuracy also assists in controlling operational costs. Automated revenue management systems have been proven to deliver accurate and reliable forecast results.
- Chatbots
The purpose of chatbot technology is to improve the guest experience. Chatbots can help guests check-in, check-out and make reservations. They can even suggest local attractions in the local area and perform a few hotel operations at a voice command. Now technology has made it possible for you to pair your chatbots with emails to send personalised emails to customers and improve their guest experience and develop a synergistic marketing funnel.
- Automation Solutions to Improve Efficiency
To be successful in any industry, it is crucial to maintain sync with technology. Use technology to provide your guests quick and faultless service, increase production, and automate the system for optimized results.
- Launch Seasonal Promotions and Offers to Stimulate Demand
The demand for hotel stays changes during certain periods and days. To maximize hotel revenue, you need to stimulate demand towards your hotel by rolling out promotional offers during high demand seasons, local festivities, national holidays, and events that recur each year.
- Create Social Media Promotion Strategy
Social media platforms are a great way to reach your target market and improve hotel business. Choose the platforms where your target audience is likely to be present and develop a social media promotion strategy around it. Share promotional content on these platforms. A few suggestions are post photos of your hotel (with highlights on the location, amenities, and activities to do nearby your hotel). Other options are introducing staff members (with a photo and a small bio) and sharing customer reviews.
- Develop a Mailing List of Your Customers
Don’t underestimate the impact of emails on improving your hotel business. The information and promotional content you send in the emails directly land into your customers or potential customer’s inbox. This means your emails have better open rates and hence a better chance of getting a lead.
- Build a Guest Rewards Sales Strategy
Many travelers today, especially the millennials, want to get more out of a deal. The same goes for the companies they do business with, hotels in particular. You can build a strategy to reward guests for frequently staying at your hotel, for referring friends and family, and for purchasing upgrades. A reward sales strategy typically increases repeat bookings and hence maximizes hotel revenue.
- Cultivate Local or Community Partnerships
This is a type of sales strategy where you team up with other tourism business professionals to promote destination and region as a whole. Carrying out a collaborative destination marketing campaign increases the influx of tourists and hence improves hotel business.
Another partnership that can maximize hotel revenue is teaming up with the various large events that happen in your region/area throughout the year. You can consider coming up with a promotion that coincides with the event taking place. By doing so, you are allowing an influx of bookings that may not have happened otherwise.
Following these strategies mentioned above, you can completely transform the way your hotel business performs. Evolve with the trends and you will find your way to the top.
Aiosell’s
automated revenue management system is a fully integrated all-in-one hotel technology that can help you maximize operational efficiency and reduce costs. Try it today and pay only when you see results!
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