Balancing indirect and direct bookings

As a way to maximize your hotel bookings, we recommend you to find your perfect balance between indirect and direct channels: Attracting direct bookings to your booking engine is important, also to increase loyalty, but having different sources, like OTAs is an alternative way to attract customers you would not be able to reach otherwise. Some travellers, in fact, have no particular hotel in mind when searching, therefore they would not perform a direct booking either way. There doesn’t need to be any competition at all with indirect channels, rather they should be seen as an opportunity to complement your direct bookings, since OTAs drive more than 50% of hotel bookings.

One of the important metrics to assess the success of your property is occupancy rate. Finding ways to boost it is part of a revenue management strategy: It is not something you need to obsess about, rather be smart about monitoring it. 

Length of stay (LOS) restrictions are a good way to increase your occupancy rate encouraging guests to stay longer at your property and can come in handy during low season periods. They give you the chance to upsell more services directly on-site, like your restaurant, spa or activities.

For example, on eDreams ODIGEO Connect you can do this by offering a promotion: You can easily set your minimum length of stay required. Also, offering something additional or a discount will give you better chances to capture guests and increase your occupancy rate. To make this strategy successful, you need to ensure your audience is correctly segmented as you will need to know what offer and discount works best on each segment.