It doesn’t take a genius to say that selling more rooms is vital for hotel groups’ overall growth and success. But this is a challenging task involving several platforms and channels like OTAs, hotel websites, corporate clients, travel agents, etc. This blog will examine how a cloud-based multi-property management can help you with more room sales via all these channels.
What is a multi-property management system?
You can call it a hotel property management system, but it has extra functionalities to serve the operational and technological needs of a hotel group. It is a comprehensive, all-in-one solution covering all areas of your hotel groups’ end-to-end operations. Most importantly, it allows your corporate office to manage all your member properties with centralised control. You can execute tasks and monitor all your hotels from the central office with just a single sign-on. Not only this, but it also assists you with in-depth group-wide, central-level reports so that you can track your KPIs and make informed decisions.
How does it help in selling more rooms?
Yes, we know that this is your biggest concern. We will look at how it assists you in selling more rooms via efficient, automated, and centralised distribution.
Let’s roll.
More OTA bookings
Let’s say you have ten properties in your group, and you are connected with 5-6 leading OTAs to sell rooms. Without the right technology, you must log into each OTA’s extranet to update your rates and inventories to ensure parity. But is it a feasible option in today’s tech-driven business environment? No, it’s not. Manual intervention is time-consuming and error-prone. It leads to overbookings and double bookings, resulting in losing business opportunities. It means you are not in a position to see more bookings coming via OTAs.
So what’s the solution? Here it is – a multi-property management system that integrates with a channel manager solution. This vital integration automatically updates rates and inventories across all OTAs in real time, leaving no scope for disparities around your rates and availabilities. This, in turn, increases your chances of getting more bookings via OTAs.
Incremental direct bookings
Even when you get more bookings with OTAs, you must pay attention to the importance of direct bookings, as you save a significant percentage of commission charges. For this, too, you need a multi-property solution that integrates with a web/internet booking engine. It makes your brand/group website a potential source for more direct bookings. Simply put, this arrangement allows you to encourage your guests to make reservations via your website.
There is more to it. You don’t have to have a reservation team to manage or keep track of bookings coming via your website. The integration takes care of everything, making your property up for booking 24/7. The multi-property management system also sends booking confirmation emails to your guests.
Centralised reservation capabilities
How do you plan on helping a guest who calls up your central/corporate office to book two rooms at one of your properties? You will have to check with the reservation team of that particular property to find out availability. Or you may have to ask the guest to call the property. But do you think today’s guests would like it? Don’t you think there is a higher chance of losing that guest to a competition that has all the information available in real time?
You can address this with a multi-property management that comes with a Central Reservation Office. It gives you the required capabilities to keep track of rates and availabilities across all your properties in real time. You gain centralised control over your reservation process and can make/accept bookings for all your member properties at the central call centre.
Enhanced room sales via packages
You can also sell more rooms with packages and promotions. It is also a very proven way of driving occupancy and RevPAR. Plus, guests who buy packages tend to book longer room nights and are less likely to cancel their bookings.
Here too, a multi-property management system does the job for you. Firstly, the system-generated, group-level reports give you ample insight into the occupancy ratio at your properties, demand, and guests’ needs. As mentioned above, with centralised control, your corporate sales and revenue management teams can create unlimited and several packages with optimum rates for different properties you have.
More corporate and travel agent bookings
The multi-property management system lets you create master profiles for your corporate clients and travel agents at the central level. After this, you can assign separate login rights to them at the property level. Once this is done, your corporate clients and travel agents can book rooms across your properties as per their requirements.
Hospitality technology solutions, especially a multi-property management system, play a vital role in your hotel group’s room sales strategy. The trick here is to select the right multi-property management system from a trusted vendor with a proven track record of helping hotel groups in more sales.
This article was originally published in Hospitalitynet.