How Can Hotels Manage Last Minute Bookings?

Due to the internet and its residual effects of having information at one’s fingertips, today’s consumers do a lot of research and comparative studies before booking any hotels.

Travelers know that nowadays you may get some extremely good deals if you book your hotels at the very last minute and they are willing to take the gamble.  With travel sites offering last minute flash deals, or specific sites and mobile apps like lastminute.com or RoomTonite, the consumer is at an advantage because in case they don’t get the best deal in their preferred hotel, there would still be other options available to them. Last minute bookings can be more cost effective and guests don’t need to worry about booking in advance and then having to pay cancellation fees if they have to change their travel plans.

All this works very well for the traveler but what about the hotels? How do they manage their room inventory and forecast their tariffs taking into account last minute reservations?

A cloud based distribution system would be the best solution to manage last minute bookings.

A distribution system allows a hotel to manage their bookings through a single dashboard across numerous sources and displays real time snapshots of bookings across all these channels.

A premium cloud based distribution system should have an integrated channel manager and GDS connect, so that room availabilities and tariffs are in sync with each other across all the channels. This way, the hotel doesn’t need to continuously manage their room inventory and tariff changes depending on how many rooms are booked or available. Can you imagine the chaos if on a daily basis a hotel needs to track how many rooms are available and then continuously ensure that they are able to sell those rooms by monitoring the pricing and juggling it across numerous booking sites? An integrated distribution system can manage it all, giving the Front Office manager enough time to focus on other things such as their guests.

Small and mid-sized hotels especially shall benefit immensely by implementing a cloud based distribution system at their hotel. All hotels don’t have the bandwidth to hire a revenue manager to solely be in charge of forecasting room revenues and juggling inventory based on room availabilities, especially when it’s not needed. A cloud based system ensures that a hotel gets an effective solution which is not only time efficient but price effective too. Hotels can enjoy the benefits of last minute bookings at a pace which shall be acceptable to them.