Welcome to Boostly Podcast Season 11 Episode 115. This is a recap of my Facebook live where I talked about direct sales in hospitality.
Here's the audio for this episode:
Timestamp
00:00 Start
01:00 Recent blog by Pablo Delgado
03:00 Why have direct bookings increased?
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Visual – YouTube
Audio – Boostly Podcast
Transcript from the Episode
There has been a growing trend over the course of the last year in the world of hospitality. And that is direct bookings, which is music to mine and many hosts around the world. And there are many factors around it. But recently, I discovered a blog on the focus wire website. And I want to dig into it today with you.
Recent blog by Pablo Delgado
The one thing that really stuck out for me is and this blog is definitely around hotels now I'm I help all hospitality owners, whether it's self catering, whether it's b&b, hotels, etc. But one thing that really stood out was this one domestic and even local customers, so less need for air travel and therefore for package sales, the big loser being Expedia, Expedia massive losers over the last year, greater reverence of brand and reputation, which again greatly facilitates direct sales over otaa sells, same language timezone. Many customers are local is much more convenient to contact the hospitality business via website or phone for answers to questions or bookings. And as it's a local call, it doesn't cost anything. So again, it goes into a lot of unnecessary talk. But if you break it down, it makes a lot of sense.
How many of you have international guests? How many of you when guests book internationally, they booked via an OTA and unless Think about it, why would they do that? Again, it's, it's a lot easier to just book through that they don't have to worry about any language barriers, because again, say that you are an expat, and you get English guests, they don't know at the point of booking that you are English, they will go on to your otaa will find you via there. And you know, unless you make it super obvious as in as a picture of you waving British flags outside, then they don't know. So then they just naturally assume it's easy to do it this way.
But when you have somebody who's doing a staycation, they know the area, they're comfortable with the language. And again, they're much more likely to click around. So even though this blog was definitely based on a hotel base, it's really good to I love reading these blogs, because again, it gives me a greater insight how the hospitality world is playing out, because again, it starts at hotels, and we just whittle it down and we get our data and what we're looking at.
Why have direct bookings increased?
This is definitely one factor. Another big factor that this blog doesn't really talk about, is that the otas closed off a lot of our calendars. And because the otas closed off a lot of their calendars, because of restrictions and because they just couldn't, there were people who still need to travel, traveling nurses, doctors, key workers, people in between homes, and etc. So they were forced to go to Google to run a search on the maps, you know, run a couple of searches on on on on internet search engine. So again, people were ending up going to websites or calling via Google business listing.
So this is why it's super important that you're not just putting your eggs all in one basket, ie the otas. You've got a Google business listing, which is going to change to Google Vacation Rentals very soon. If you're a b&b hotel owner, it'll stay exactly the same. Because it's very important. You've got a website, it's very important that you can take direct bookings, and it's very important on your website. And again, they talk about it in this blog, is that the incentives that the hotels offer their guests when they book directly is a big factor of why people were choosing to book direct.
So what does this tell you? If the big hotels, the big chains are given incentives to people to book direct? Why are you Why are you so everybody on your website now go and think about what incentive you can give a guest when they book direct, it doesn't have to be a price, it doesn't have to be the best rate. It can be for example, maybe you give them a little welcome basket, you know, tea coffees, etc. Maybe you give them free Wi Fi. Maybe you could do an earlier check-in I talked about this before this Google Boostly YouTube channel and it's on there in the playlist on how you can give an earlier checkout time and a later checkout time on the otas. And it's a great way of flipping it.
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