Three secrets your booking engine is dying to tell you
Your booking engine holds a goldmine of free data, but only if you take the time to unearth it.
Sadly, most accommodation providers aren’t doing so. By taking the time to dig deeper to find this smart data, you’ll take massive strides to outpace your comparison set in the battle for bookings and profits.
Here are three pieces of revenue-generating data trapped inside your hotel booking engine:
1. Unconstrained Demand
Your revenue management team uses this term to describe the quantity of rooms that could be sold if there were no inventory or pricing constraints for a specific date in the future. (Don’t take this definition literally, since obviously it is impossible to imagine any day where you have unlimited guest rooms at a zero price tag).
Do you know which dates in the future have extraordinary demand? Your booking engine does. The idea is to identify when unconstrained demand is high.
This way, you can determine which low paying business to deny by raising rates or creating stay restrictions for the dates in high demand.
2. “No Availability” Displays
Do you unknowingly block bookings on your own direct hotel website because you have too much inventory locked up with more expensive 3rdparty channels? It’s surprisingly common for hoteliers to be in the dark about how many times potential guests are essentially turned away because they are shown a “Sorry, no availability” screen for their preferred dates.
Of course, you want to earn the most revenue from any of your available rooms. And, of course you would rather sell your rooms through the most profitable channel – your own hotel booking engine.
But, the only way to know is to harvest your booking engine data to reveal how many times you are actually blocking direct business on a particular date.
3. Demand For Different Room Types
Normally, revenue managers examine the highs and lows of your bookings by date. But on an industry standard, that single-focused method means you’re missing the opportunity to fine tune your prices based on different room types.
Your booking engine can reveal searches vs. actual bookings for each room type. You may find that your double rooms are in higher demand on the weekends, and they can justify a higher rate than your standard rooms over in-demand dates.
By focusing your revenue management activities only on your entry-level rooms, you’re essentially only revenue managing a small fraction of your whole inventory.
Tambourine is a US-based marketing, booking and distribution service that helps hotel and travel marketers sort it all out. It delivers a 360º program that reduces stress and increases revenue.
