The first thing you need to do when trying to increase your hotel’s income is to improve your direct booking rate. When making reservations through online travel agencies, you need to pay a commission from each transaction made. With direct bookings, you can skip the commission and earn full revenue each time.

Need more reasons to convince you that increasing your direct bookings will improve your revenue? Here’s a couple:

Earn the full price of every room with each reservation

In order to advertise to a much wider customer base, hoteliers need to work with online travel agencies who will act as an intermediary during booking. For such a service, OTAs usually charge between 20% to 30% commission – which is a lot! If you increase your direct booking rate, you can benefit from 0 commission all the time.

While relying solely on direct bookings might not be the best idea, there are ways to increase the direct booking share of your reservations. You can try making your hotel’s website more mobile-friendly or introduce a loyalty program for guests who book directly.

Upsell your rooms with direct bookings

Reservations made through direct bookings pass through your own booking system – which can be easily customized to show your customers exactly what you want them to see. This gives you the opportunity to promote premium services, like additional amenities, spa, meals, and others.

Better management of customer satisfaction with direct bookings

If your hotel’s website is running a hotel management system, every direct booking provides useful data that can be used to optimize your hotel’s inner workings and improve your guest’s experience

When booking through an OTAs platform, you are very often not getting full access to all of the relevant data. By carefully following your guest’s booking and shopping patterns, you can implement meaningful changes to improve your hotel’s revenue.

Improve your guest’s experience with direct bookings

Because a direct booking gives the full price of the room to the hotel, guest satisfaction can be improved with various freebies. Offering free services and amenities for your guests who book directly through your website will not only improve their experience, but also help you get more direct booking through incentivizing.

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