Earlier, hotels had to only compete with other hotels. But with the entry of BnBs into the hospitality industry, competition has increased manifold. Hotels need to level up, with approximately 45.6 million travelers resorting to BnBs. Hotels must build a strong online presence to beat the competition while ensuring their clients’ top-notch services. It is here that hotel commerce steps in.
It helps you attract new customers to your hotel and retain the existing ones. One of the key ways to boost loyalty is to establish hotel commerce.
It facilitates better maintenance of your hotel business with substantially less exertion when compared to the earlier requirement. This system aims to automate extensive tasks, helping you easily manage your hectic timetable.
It helps you establish an effective hotel management system where you control every aspect of your business.
A well-established hotel management system has multiple advantages, including saving time on administrative tasks, strengthened customer relations, increased online visibility, improved profit margins, reduced manual errors, and more.
Since hotel commerce is the need of the hour, learning about it can greatly assist you and your business. This article will take you through the meaning and definition of hotel commerce, its importance, ways to apply it, and more!
What is Hotel Commerce?
The capacity to quickly and easily provide guests with goods and services that are convenient, personalized, and valuable is referred to as hotel commerce. As a result, you have more control over all facets of your business and are firmly in the driver’s seat.
Before, it was simple to draw a line between traditional business from online commerce. E-commerce and brick-and-mortar stores both refer to commerce. Today, there is little distinction between the two because almost every company distributes its brand, goods, or services online.
This fact is acknowledged by hotel commerce, which minimizes daily inventory sales restrictions, increases revenue, and helps you feel in control of your business.
Therefore, hotel commerce, particularly hotel commerce platforms, may let your company operate according to the same standards as major e-commerce businesses.
What Are the Benefits of Hotel Commerce?
Hoteliers have long needed help navigating the industry’s many different systems and scattered data.
External concerns like personnel shortages and economic pressures only add to the existing pile of complications. Changes in traveler behavior, motivations, and preferences are other major problems a hotel owner faces.
The advancements made by gigantic e-commerce platforms like Amazon imply that your customers now anticipate the same service standards from every online platform.
Therefore, not only are you expected to have a strong online presence, but you also need to excel in providing online services. Hotel commerce has the solution to most of the mentioned problems.
There are several benefits to hotel commerce, including:
- Removing restrictions on your ability to promote and sell your property
- Providing more options to increase sales
- Converting a lack of control into full control of your business’s activities
- Making the fragmented data centralized and available immediately
- Making the most of resources, professionals, and technological solutions
How to Establish an Effective Hotel Commerce System?
Let us have a look at the various ways in which you can establish an effective hotel commerce framework:
1. Establish direct booking channels
Direct reservations help you generate more direct revenue. Therefore, you must uphold the relevance of establishing direct booking channels for your hotel business.
These channels also help you prevent pricing disparities, create a strong brand image, access pertinent customer information, and more.
Creating and optimizing your website, providing clients with additional offers and discounts for booking directly from your website, indulging in SEO, actively posting on various social media platforms, etc., are some of the most effective ways to establish and strengthen your direct booking channels.
2. List your hotel on indirect booking channels
While establishing your direct booking channels is pertinent to the growth of your business, there are other things. You only establish a comprehensive hotel reservation system by associating with direct and indirect booking channels.
Indirect booking channels help you reach out to a wider audience, establish your hotel’s foothold in the industry, allow you to streamline your services, and more.
Therefore, even though getting in touch with indirect booking channels may cost you additional money, it is integral to the well-being of your business.
3. Launch advertisements
Online advertisements are a great way to grab the potential client’s attention. Since Google is the world’s largest search engine, Google hotel ads are the most effective.
Launching advertisements can boost your hotel business, with most travelers looking for hotel recommendations online.
4. Use a central reservation system (CRS)
For hotels to reach customers across as many channels as necessary as their distribution strategy, the reservation information will be sent in real-time from the PMS/s to the distribution channels by a central reservation system.
The platform’s capability to handle room assignments for single to multi-property groups and chains is particularly assistive for hotel managers who want to manage multi-channel and multi-property strategies using a single source.
Customers may access multi-property offers from a single source of truth, and revenue managers can swiftly respond to market demand and modify prices. Front office managers can also issue reservations and assign rooms from a single source of truth.
Gain a Competitive Edge with AxisRooms
Establishing an effective hotel commerce framework is not a cakewalk. Things can get tedious for a hotel owner, from inventory management to global distribution systems.
It is here that AxisRooms comes into the picture. We offer multiple tools, including a channel manager, revenue management services, and a hotel reservation engine.
AxisRooms is a hotel management software that seeks to improve guest experiences and lighten your workload without causing a hole in your pocket.
If managing your bookings from various channels seems like an arduous task to you, you can rely on our channel manager. We help you automate your bookings so that you don’t have to update information manually.
Our channel manager also integrates and operates with a variety of top Cloud Hotel PMSs, and automates the real-time data transfer between your PMS and all of your direct and indirect sales channels, including rate, reservation, restriction, and inventory.
Since we use a pooled inventory model, all channels will have exact availability. You can access it anytime from anywhere using a cloud-based application.
Our revenue consultants can help you increase your revenue. We provide current, high-quality material and photos for your hotel across all platforms. We help increase your web presence to reach certain markets.
We apply upselling and upgrading strategies to the right customer at the right time and price to increase revenue. We keep track of no-shows, cancellations, and other events to change prices or give special discounts to encourage confirmed reservations and boost loyalty.
We keep an eye on trends, supply, demand, and other important market conditions to detect opportunities for revenue growth.
We also create a price strategy that is supported by data by examining studies on market segments, channel performance, etc. AxisRooms also helps you get more direct bookings via the web booking engine.
Our additional resources include e-books, blogs, case studies, and guides. Therefore, if you are on the hunt for hotel software, AxisRooms can be an ideal choice!
