How to increase Hotel sales and revenue using a travel technology solution

In the current world of competition, most of the business wants to increase sales and optimize revenue to stay afloat and Travel is no different, in fact, Travel is one of the most competitive business spaces.

Hotel is one of the major chunks of revenues for both inbound and outbound travel agencies which includes Travel Agency, Tour Operators, Travel Management Companies, Destination Management Companies.

Once the good Hotel Booking Engine solution is successfully implemented by the travel company not only it gives them an edge over the competition but also helps them in more sales and optimize Bottom Line Revenue.

Hotel Travel technology or Hotel Booking Engine Solutions can offer the following advantages to travel companies:

• Automation:

Once the Hotel travel technology solution is implemented, the entire offline/traditional process is automated from search to book. This helps travel companies save a lot in terms of the time of travel consultant performing the repetitive task. As a result they have time in hand to focus on more specialized activities, enhancing customer experience, negotiating better rates from suppliers resulting in an increase in sales and profits respectively.   

• Multiple Selling Channels:

Travel technology implementation results in bringing all the selling channels to be technology-driven which were earlier managed offline resulting in biased human factors involved. Travel technology has resulted in bringing all the sales channels like POS (Point of Sales) for travel agency sales staff, B2B selling channel for travel agents and sub-agents, White Label selling channel also referred as B2B2C, OTA (Online Travel Agency) or B2C website and OBT (Online Booking Tool) or Corporate POS. All these sales channels are managed and driven through a technology platform.

• Selling on Hotel Metasearches:

Post-implementation of an OTA (Online Travel Agency) platform travel companies can tie up with various meta-search platforms like Trivago, Wego, Sky scanner, Kayak, etc. to sell their hotel inventory to regional and global customers without investing huge on the marketing.

• Single window access to multiple hotel suppliers:

As in the traditional travel business model, a travel consultant has to login to multiple suppliers’ systems, perform the search, get the result and arrange the information in an excel or word document, apply the markup manually and share the offers with the client. The quality of rates and offers dependent on the judgment of the travel consultant, also if there are more than 4-5 suppliers, he may not even login to every system, based on his judgment he will search in 2-3 or max 4 system to save time and as per his convenience. Travel may be lucky to get the best quotation offered with the highest margins.
But with the Hotel Booking Engine – there are no biased results cheapest or the best price will come on the top, giving the best deal to the customer and securing the profits for Travel Agency.

• Maintaining the good mix of Direct Suppliers & Aggregators:

As this is the challenge faced by many travel companies, agencies that all suppliers should start with, as getting too many suppliers onboard may be time-consuming and requires a lot of clerical work. Hotel suppliers do ask for deposits – so may result in huge investments. The best approach is to maintain a good mix of direct suppliers and aggregators like choose from HotelBeds, GTA, MIKI, Bedsonline, etc. and aggregators like TBO, Rezlive, W2M, Stuba, WHL, DOTW, RTS.net, Itrip, etc.

• Unbiased Results:

As in the traditional mode of operations – it’s on bias ness of travel consultant to search and book with the respective suppliers resulting in booking whatever he or she feels right. This may result in failure to offer the best rates to clients and may result in loss of client and revenue. Once the hotel booking engine is implemented it offers the best match as per the client requirements searching from all the enabled suppliers.

• Faster Response Time:

As all the API suppliers’ inventory and direct contracted hotels are available to be booked through a single booking engine – the response time is shortened resulting in more sales and profits.

• Mapped Content:

Hotel mapping solutions helps travel companies to overcome the issue of duplication, wrong hotel, selling the stale inventory. With the help of hotel mapping solutions travel companies always have access to the latest and updated inventory from multiple suppliers and the cheapest rooms are sold to customers, maybe coming from multiple suppliers providing the cheapest rates. Some of the mapping solutions provider VeTravel

• Multi Language Content:

Hotel inventory is offered in multiple languages from some of the suppliers which can be made available to customers through B2C or OTA selling channels in their respective languages resulting in enhances customer experience and loyalty.

• Minimise Human Error:

As travel technology is performing day to day repetitive tasks, markups and commissions are standardized, with no human biasedness, technology-driven documentation, etc. all these factors result in minimizing human error as a result of less cost of operations and higher net profit.

• Post sales profit Optimization through Hotelmize:

Hotelmize offers a unique technology solution, optimizes the revenue by increasing the profits on refundable hotel bookings. Based on artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities of Hotelmize solution, it automates the rebook of the refundable hotel inventory (Apple to an Apple) at an available cheapest price generating additional profits.

• Discount and Promotion:

Technology solutions enable travel agencies to increase sales through discounts and promotional offers. For B2C customers they can create and distribute discounts for repeat sales from the customers. For B2B customers they can share the various promotional offers on hotels around the year, which such agents can see on their dashboard and push it to their customers.

• Auto cancelation:

Booking without payment is autocanceled by the system, it doesn’t wait for the operations team to manually cancel the booking, as per the auto cancelation condition system will cancel the booking in case the payment is not updated to avoid any cancelation penalties. Travel companies can also overwrite the actual cancelation conditions coming from suppliers just to secure themselves.

• Prioritising suppliers or direct inventory:

Travel companies can configure the suppliers as per their commercial relationship with the suppliers – if they have any kickback or additional profits from the given supplier, they can promote those suppliers more compared to others also they can mark their direct contracts as preferred hotels, etc.  

• Integrating with channel managers:

Channel Managers basically helps the distribution of hotel content to multiple sales channels – Travel Agencies, OTA’s, Suppliers through a centralized web-based application. Hotel prices and inventory can be managed by the content owners and can make the changes for rates & availability for different channels. Once saved it’s automatically updated on all the selling channels. It also tells the hoteliers insight into the best prices to sell the hotel through its revenue management solutions. The best Examples would be Rate Gain, Siteminder, Derby Soft.

These are a few of the benefits of implementing hotel travel technology, booking engine solutions. If you are a tour operator you can implement direct contracting solutions to automate your offline contracts.

What to discuss about your requirements, please fill the following form: