Lessons learnt about Expedia and OTA’s in general

I had the opportunity to go to a session with Expedia last week.

To start with, I was slightly frustrated by the way they claim to “help us with our bookings”, all I could see was the fact that I had to pay 15% commission and just because everyone else was on Expedia I had to be as well. 

After listening and talking to fellow operators I re-thought my position somewhat. I would still prefer everyone booking from my website and if I was perfectly honest, I actually prefer the option of people talking to us directly as we can give them the best advice, but in reality we know OTA’s have a strong presence talking with guests with their mass marketing ability. 

I think as operators, we must spend time (or employ someone to) to manage these OTA sites on a regular basis. The best way to get to the top of the page is to make content changes regularly. This can simply be done by changing the words describing your property or updating a photo or changing the rates. The way these sites operate is that they have algorithms to calculate who should feature at the top of page one. These are based on the content adjustments we make. There is another option of paying more commission but, why would you? 

This information does not just relate to Expedia but to all OTA’s. We must make sure our content is correct at all times and it is important to look at these sites as a customer would on a regular basis to see what they are seeing about our properties. 

The other conversation we had was with an extra revenue manager from a big hotel. This provided some really good information and basically made me realise I have to get over myself and start charging premium rates for premium events. The hotels do it but as we know they can increase their prices by 200%-300%. This physically makes me feel sick but adding $50 per night onto a room when the whole town is fully booked makes sense. She talked about having several different price points on any given day, personally I think that could become too complicated for a small business but, if you have only a few rooms left add something extra on because you can. T