Fill up empty beds by getting more direct bookings for your holiday let

Direct bookings: How to get More for your Holiday Rental

Direct bookings are great! You don’t have to give up your revenue to a middleman, you can build a stronger relationship with your customers, and you can provide much better customer service.

Unfortunately, many holiday rentals rely on Online Travel Agents to get their bookings. Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to get more direct bookings from the website of your holiday rental. Here are some ideas:

Work on your existing listings before working on direct bookings

It might seem counterintuitive to spend more time working on your OTA listings. These are still important, though, for getting those initial clients. According to Travel Tripper, between 61% and 75% of customers use OTAs to book their properties. You can tap into this market to find your initial clients and then use these guests to build more direct bookings.

So, what can you do to get more initial bookings through OTAs?

On its blog, hundredrooms suggests improving the photography for your listing. This will make your property more visually appealing. Pictures are the most effective advertisement for your property, so make sure you invest in great photography.

You should also make sure the written content is as descriptive as possible. Mention all of the perks of booking your rental. Write a little bit about the local area and make sure to include aspects of existing customer feedback. By including this info from the feedback, you are tapping directly into what made your previous guests love your rental.

Find your unique selling point.

What makes your property special? Rifling through customer reviews is also great for helping you find your USP. If reviews are always raving about your incredible pool, be sure to make this front and centre of your marketing efforts. Hundredrooms suggests using this as your main photo on OTAs, but it should also be front and centre of your own website for building up those direct bookings. You can also work SEO keywords related to your USP into the written content on your website, so it is one of the first things people see when looking for, say, “villa with great pool in Biggleswade.”

You can also better target niche audiences. Do you allow dogs? Make sure you write about it on your website. Dog owners can have a rough time looking for suitable properties in any area, and yours is sure to stand out if you have been explicit about your policy of allowing pets.

You can also use this information to market more directly to your ideal customers and cut out the OTAs. It is surprising how many dog-owning holidaymaker groups there are on Facebook. Join them, interact, and tell them about your dog-friendly villa with an awesome pool.

Work on a remarketing campaign

This is likely the most effective way of getting direct bookings. Whenever someone books through an OTA, or even directly, you should be capturing their basic info – email address, preferences and details of their stay. Schofield’s also suggests capturing this information from website visitors. There are a number of tools available – especially if you use WordPress – to make this data capture process easier but ensure you frequently check over the data.

Once you have this info, you can remarket to them using email and social media. Just make you only use data that the guest gives out voluntarily so it doesn’t seem creepy. Email newsletters are a great way to entice previous guests into considering a second trip. You can also consider special subscriber perks such as discounts and free wine if they book via email.

Anyone who leaves their email address on your website should be contacted within a day or so. They may be mulling over where to book, so send a short email inviting them back to your site. This can be a simple reminder of what makes your property great. You can also offer perks. Again, only do this if they have voluntarily given their email address.

Establish loyalty perks

 

This is a tried and tested method for getting rebookings. Everyone from Costa Coffee to Subway has been doing it for years in the food business, and it is becoming increasingly common in the world of vacation rentals. Loyalty perks can come in a variety of ways.

The most obvious perk is to offer a discount to returning guests. This can be done through the email marketing system, or it can be done directly when they leave your property. Schofield’s suggests that you can also extend this discount to friends and family. It’s already great if your guests are raving about your property to friends when they get home. Offering a discount for these additional guests will only sweeten the deal.

You can also offer more personalised perks. Many hotel chains offer recurring guests a “surprise and delight” incentive. This is where staff are encouraged to give personalised treats to loyal customers. You can keep the information in your data capture database about each customer. If a loyal customer always talks about how much they love the local sweets brand, leave a bag on their pillow the next time they stay. Do they always bring their dog? Leave a new dog toy in the room for them. These personalised perks will show the guests you care about them – encouraging more direct bookings.

Boost your digital marketing to gain more direct bookings

If you want to gain access to a new audience that you might not be getting to through OTAs and remarketing, digital marketing can be a great way to do this. As already mentioned, Facebook Groups are a great tool for doing this as it lets you reach out to a specific niche of people. You can also work on your use of hashtags on Instagram.

SEO is an important concept for getting more website visits. If you’re using WordPress, plenty of plug-ins help you with this. If you are truly stuck, consider hiring a professional. There is a bit of trial and error involved, but once it works, you will notice massive increases in people looking at your website.

Finally, Schofield's also suggested looking into paid advertising. To boost your SEO efforts, you can advertise on AdWords to get your ad seen in the right places. You can advertise on Google itself, or you can advertise on any of the websites in their network. Many bloggers add AdWords to their sites to make some cash, and you can target your AdWords ads to the only feature on the right kind of blogs. Do some audience research before committing to a budget.

Facebook Advertising is the easiest and quickest method of gaining new potential customers. You can narrow down your audience to only reach people likely to book. This also takes some research. However, you can upload remarketing list information to Facebook to make the process easier. Facebook has an option where you can choose only to target people who have looked at your website. You can also narrow down by demographics and interests. This is usually the cheapest of the paid advertising options if you target well.

There are heaps of options out there for upping your chances of direct bookings. These are just some of the simplest tools available for you to use right now. Once you have got these right, you can also look into how content creation and non-traditional marketing methods could help you. Give it a go.

Next Up… Go Further and Boost your direct bookings with these simple tips

Regardless of the size of your property, the most important thing about your business is having more direct bookings and increasing your revenue. The good news is there are a lot of tools that give us tips on how to do this.

Here are some simple ways to boost your revenue and increase your direct bookings.

Make direct bookings with your website easy.

Nobody hates a slow and buggy website. Todd A. Vines of Screen Pilot wrote in his article that hotels fail to capture direct bookings simply because OTA sites offer a more user-friendly booking interface. You should take some time to assess and evaluate your website's booking process to see if it's user-friendly and straightforward.

Use clear CTAs to highlight your direct booking offers

One of the great opportunities businesses miss is converting their website visitors from lookers to bookers. Making your CTAs bright and eye-catching is one of the tips mentioned by Trivago Business Blog. These CTAs should highlight your current offers and incentives to capture your guests' attention and eventually entice them to book with you.

Use social media

If your website has a blog, don't forget to share your blog posts, offers, discounts and incentives there. Sumari van Dyk shares this fantastic tip on her article at Falstar Media. Upon sharing to social media, you are creating traffic and clicks back to your website.

Your direct booking facility can be an incredible tool for your business if you make it accessible and promote it regularly. You have to ensure that its set-up will give the best experience to your clients. Through this, they will fall in love with online booking and eventually book directly with you. The great news is that they might come again!

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