Have you started a new hotel business? Are you willing to increase room sales and the resulting profits? Are you aware of what needs to be done for it?
If you are unaware of how you could boost your sales and profits, then you are deprived of the efficacy of a channel manager and booking engine. It is a technological paradise for hoteliers, as it eases the job for them to increase room sales, enhance guest experience and avoid manual errors.
The big hotel businesses in the industry are currently leveraging the maximum potential of these two tools. So, suppose you are just starting a new hospitality business. In that case, this article will educate you on how to increase room sales by integrating a booking engine and channel manager into your property management system (PMS).
Increasing Room Sales with the Use of a Channel Manager
The best way to start a hotel business is by partnering with different online travel agencies (OTAs), retail travel agencies, and Global Distribution Systems (GDS). It is because, initially, when you are out to build a brand name for yourself, you cannot just market your rooms through direct channels.
You need to build a reputation among the target audience, and once you have their attention, start with other marketing approaches. Making your rooms and services available through OTAs comes at a nominal commission cost, which reduces your profit count. But, building a brand will cost you your efforts and money in the initial run.
When dealing with OTAs and other distribution channels, you might have to follow up on several updates on all the partnered channels. Suppose you have specific types of rooms and services that are priced differently. In that case, you will have to update those price differences and specifications consistently in all distribution channels.
Apart from that, real-time inventory updates on all these channels are also important, without which there might be issues such as overbooking or poor guest experience. Hence, this is where a channel manager steps in.
Channel manager is a software solution that integrates with your PMS and helps you manage and optimize distribution channels under one roof. It allows you to set prices on a centralized portal, which gets updated across all partnered channels.
If a room or service is sold or booked for specific dates, it will be updated consistently across all channels to avoid overlapped bookings. All of this happens in real-time, as every information passes through the channel manager to/from the distribution channels.
Benefits of a Channel Manager for Increasing Sales
To help you understand the perks of a channel manager for boosting your business benefits, here are a few of the benefits of its utilization:
1. Connecting to more online channels
As you can easily manage the distribution channels you are already using, it will allow you to expand your brand exposure to more reputed OTAs. In this way, you can target the channels with the maximum traffic of potential travelers. As more potential guests find you in their searches, it will likely increase room sales.
2. Increase the brand recognition
If you are a new hotel business, your potential guests are not yet aware of you and your service offerings. So, by integrating your sales and services through various distribution channels, you will be accepting the opportunity of being recognized. People who didn’t even hear your hotel’s name will consider you from the search results to book from you. In this way, you will not just have new fresh bookings but also many repeat customers.
3. Achieve full occupancy
With an integrated channel management solution, you will be sure that customers book only the available rooms. It is because your channel manager will update the inventory status in real-time.
Overbooking is the prime reason why hotels cannot achieve full occupancy. Guests keep booking the same rooms already booked through other channels. Suppose you are on a manual update routine and missed out on changing the availability of your popular rooms. In that case, you might face difficulties during check-in of those customers or eventually lose them.
Increasing Room Sales with the Use of a Booking Engine
When you have already gained momentum in the hospitality sector and people have started to come in and stay in your hotels, it is time you promote direct bookings through your website or mobile application. It will help you cut through the commissions of OTAs and keep all the profit with you.
Integrating a booking engine with your PMS system will do the needful to maintain real-time data flow over the website. Like the channel manager did for the distribution channels, the booking engine will update the inventory details in real-time, but for your website and all direct sales channels.
It is not just that, but you can also capture the reservation and guest details seamlessly through your booking engine and add it to your database to personalize the services for repeat guests. Booking engine will take in direct bookings from your website or mobile application.
Following that, you can also try upselling the room upgrades and services to your potential guests through direct channels and bringing in more revenue per room.
Benefits of a Booking Engine for Increasing Sales
To learn how to increase room sales with hotel booking engines, here are a few benefits to give you better clarity:
1. Keep your business open 24/7
Booking engine links directly to your website and other direct channels. So, there is no way you are setting any time window for the guests to proceed with their bookings. Your hotel will be open 24/7 for the available rooms.
Hence, you are drawing the attention of your potential guests by increasing room sales without any operational halts, unless there is a maintenance period for the website.
2. Automatically syncs in with channel manager and PMS
Even if you use channel manager and booking engine together, the data will be updated in sync. The bookings made over the booking engine will be updated over the channel manager and PMS. And the same happens vice versa.
3. Upselling add-ons and room upgrades
Booking engine allows you to add upsells to your website. This way, the order size will increase, and you will have more profitable sales. In addition to that, you can also promote offers, discounts, and service incentives to guests who book directly with you. This way, your direct bookings will increase, and so will the occupancy and profit rate.
Find the Best Hotel Tech Solutions with AxisRooms
AxisRooms is the hub for all of the essential products that your hospitality business needs. We operate with a world-class booking engine and channel manager to help your business become limitless in acquiring more sales and earnings.
Increasing room sales and revenue work hand-in-hand. At AxisRooms, we have designed our software solutions in a way that automates the most daunting task of updating the room and service availability insights into the brand’s direct channels and third-party distribution channels.
Our booking engine can help you not just with managing direct bookings but will also help you set up taxes, create in-depth reports, and offer multiple payment options as well. Our channel manager will help you update the prices once, sync them to all channels, keep a real-time tab on room availability, and keep it consistent across all integrated platforms.
We offer cloud-based solutions to let our clients access their dashboards anytime without hassle. So, check out our website and leave your details in the given form for us to reach out and give you a demonstration of what we have to offer.
Summing up
Put an end to your manual intervention in updating inventory for your direct and indirect sales channels. Stop leaving loopholes for overbooking, low occupancy, poor guest experience, and other problems.
Upgrade your hotel management solutions by integrating a booking engine and channel manager. Try AxisRooms for it, and you might experience a rapid increase in room sales in a very short span of time.
