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Do curso por ESSEC Business School

The fundamentals of hotel distribution

511 classificações

ESSEC Business School

The fundamentals of hotel distribution

511 classificações

Curso 1 de 4 em Specialization Hotel Management: Distribution, Revenue and Demand Management

In today’s hotel sector an increasingly complex network of traditional and web based channels have to be managed to insure hotel success. Key questions include: how should you distribute over the web? What should you include on your brand.com website so people book through it? How can you maximise the potential of online travel agents (OTAs)? With the distribution environment both highly complex and constantly evolving, this course will give you comprehensive foundation of current industry practices to help jump start your career in this fascinating domain. Acknowledgements: Claire Bertrand, Vincent Chatain, Jessica Moses, Benjamin Six (ESSEC Business School), Emilie Dupré (Image-In), Gregory Halidy (Triplay)

Na lição

How to manage your OTA

In this final module you will attack the critical issue of how to work better with Online Travel Agents. Learning best practices from OTA managers themselves, you will make sure that you are exploiting these valuable and fast growing points of sale to their maximum potential.

The Billboard Effect7:15

Pay-per-Performance1:56

Market Information2:50

Conheça os instrutores

Peter O'Connor
Professor of information systems, Director of the MBA in Hospitality Management
Information systems
Nicolas Graf
Professeur
Management

[MUSIC]

The first of these is undoubtedly reach.

By working with the right OTA, or

more probably the right portfolio of OTAs, a hotel can make itself available for

sale in markets that it could only dream of addressing on its own.

Here I'm not simply referring to just being listed on websites and

different geographical parts of the world.

But also being placed in front of supplementary market segments, and being

displayed on developing media channels such as mobile and interactive television.

All opportunities for exposure and sales that would be very difficult for

the hotel to address independently.

For example, an independent hotel here in France would realistically,

typically find it very difficult to sell itself in different foreign markets.

Perhaps it could justify the resources needed to develop a web presence in

English And maybe one other European language.

But without a significant marketing budget and

with limited market knowledge and marketing expertise,

in the online environment it would effectively have very low visibility and

thus would not be very likely to be booked by many foreign visitors.

By working with the appropriate OTA, this hotel would immediately be listed and

available for sale on that company's multiple web presences all over the world,

with its content translated into each customer's native language, and

localized to the market norms, and with traffic being driven by substantial

marketing budgets and expertise of the OTA.

Using the right portfolio of partners,

thus allows the hotel to massively increase the number and

diversity of geographical markets from which it realistically can get bookings.

Helping to boost occupancy.

Here for example, this chart from Expedia clearly shows the diversity of markets

that you could potentially address simply by being listed on their system.

However, it's not just all about geography.

Most OTAs also target multiple specific B to C markets with specialized products.

So for example, many have corporate booking websites

specifically targeting the business customer.

Or allow their users to dynamically package air and

hotel together to create their own customized packages.

Simply by being listed on the OTA.

Hotels can get themselves into these consideration sets.

Positioning themselves in front of customers that will be difficult or

impossible for them to access otherwise.

And thus potentially generating even more bookings.

Lastly, since most have origins as tech companies, the majority of

OTAs are at the cutting edge of consumer adoption of developing technologies.

The explosion in the sales of hotels rooms through mobile devices that we're seeing

at the moment is a great example of an area

that most hotels would be unlikely to be able profit from independently.

Even though they could theoretically develop and promote their own mobile app,

the customer acquisition cost challenge that we discussed earlier with high

development cost divided by a small but growing number of mobile reservations,

makes pursuing this opportunity infeasible for most properties or

small chains in the short run.

However, to cash in on the growing trend,

they can ensure that they're listed on the right OTAs.

Allowing themselves to get reservations from those that are booking through

mobile channels without any of the upfront or ongoing costs.

It's important to note that this reach benefit is as important for

hotel chains as it is for independents, although chains typically have more

technical and marketing resources as well as hopefully more budget.

Than independence.

Their pockets are not bottomless, thus we are seeing an increasing number of chains

strategically partnering with selective OTAs to attack particular markets.

Where booking volumes are initially at least forecast to be low.

Many are choosing to work with the dominant OTA, rather than translate and

localize content for themselves.

In effect, swapping an upfront capitol cost for

a commission-based transaction fee.

A typical example is Marriott, which uses Booking.com as a partner to power it's

websites in the Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Brazilian Portuguese languages.

In this way, it can attack and receive bookings from these high potential, but

as yet, low performing markets, with minimum cost, and little risk.

While at the same time, profiting from the technology, and

the marketing expertise of their OTA partner.

Thus we can see that working with an OTA

should end up with a hotel getting more exposure.

Which assuming that the product is good and is well presented,

as we will discuss later in this module, should result in Incremental bookings.

Reservations that the hotel would have not gotten otherwise.

Thus, helping to fill rooms that would otherwise have gone empty.

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