We know that, as a hotelier, your foremost objective is to sell more rooms and increase occupancy, and the statistics around them are a few critical metrics you would like to look at every day. This blog will examine several proven ways to achieve both at your chain hotel and how a multi-property management solution can help you with your efforts.
Let’s first sell more rooms
From an operations point of view, a cloud-based multi-property solution will automate the whole process across all your properties and offer you centralised control. Now let’s see how it helps you with selling more rooms.
Generate more direct bookings:
With an all-in-one multi-property solution, comes an integrated web/online booking engine. This ultimate tool gets you more direct bookings via your brand website. While you can capture and process bookings and payments 24/7 without any manual intervention, you get to save significantly as you are no longer worried about paying commission charges to OTAs.
Get more online bookings:
This is where a seamless two-way integration between two cloud-based solutions – the Hotel PMS and channel manager does the job. It empowers you with real-time updates of rates and availability on OTAs. This, in turn, leads to an enhanced online reach of your brand for additional bookings while eliminating chances of overbookings and double bookings.
Centrally manage reservations:
A Central Reservation Office (CRO) software does this. It allows your central call centre/reservation office staff to find room availability across your member properties in real-time. It also lets them process and confirm the booking for your guests. It is a great way to capture incremental direct bookings.
Finding your hotel’s occupancy rate
To get this, you must do this simple math. For any given date or a specific period, divide the number of rooms occupied by the total number of rooms available/vacant at your property. You can find this figure by day, week, month, or year. Your occupancy percentage indicates your success in selling and keeping your rooms full. Using occupancy percentage along with RevPAR and ADR is advisable to determine your hotel’s financial performance and overall profitability. Many factors can influence the occupancy levels at your hotel. Some of them are –
- Your sales strategy
- Targeted guest segment
- Room pricing
- Competition pricing
- Locality
- Service quality
- Online reputation
- Seasonality and events
Now, we will look at various efficient ways to keep your rooms full for extended days.
Having clarity on your hotel’s occupancy rates helps you analyse the demand – on which days of the week and seasons/months of the year, demand for your room is likely to be high. You can leverage this information to configure your room rates during the low seasons based on occupancy, local events, and roll out promotional packages, etc., to fill in more rooms.
Sell value along with packages:
There is no need to conclude that offering “heavy discounts” will get you more bookings. It might work this year during the off-season but might not work next year. Instead, create packages that offer value. Work with your revenue management team to locate growing and popular trends like workcations and staycations for remote workers. Remote workers generally prefer staying for a more extended period. Bundle various services and amenities they need, including uninterrupted high-speed Wi-Fi, comfortable work setup, etc. You can also offer carefully crafted staycation deals for families and groups. By the way, a feature-rich multi-property solution allows you to configure such packages based on your brand, offerings, and target audience.
And of course, don’t forget to sell your property’s core USP, like location, collection of food and beverages, or just whatever you think has the potential to draw more guests while making them stay longer.
Know your guest segment:
Segmenting guests under the right category as per your location and offerings is a must. For example, if all or some member properties of your group are in central business districts, you should target corporate guests to fill in rooms during the weekdays. The other advantage here is that, once you have them at your property, you can convert them to repeat guests with top-notch service.
The crux here is to understand who your guests are, what segment they belong to, how many times they have stayed with you, and their past purchase history. You can do all these with a multi-property management system with a robust centralised guest history module. It will help you offer them customised services.
Implement length of stay pricing:
With high demand, weekends are primarily busy days for you as you witness higher occupancy even when you charge higher rates. But what about the following Monday and Tuesday that you expect to see low occupancy? How about enticing those weekend guests to stay a bit longer – for two more days?
The trick here is to tweak your room rates for the following Monday and Tuesday to look less expensive. For example, if you are selling your suite room for Rs 5000 per night, you may charge Rs 16000 for four nights – Saturday to Tuesday. Your objective should be to change room rates based on the maximum/minimum length of stay to increase occupancy while netting more RevPAR. Have your revenue management team work on implementing the length-of-stay restriction to increase occupancy and RevPAR by either carefully improving demand on shoulder nights or by slowing down demand on peak nights.
Here too, a chain hotel software and an integrated revenue management solution can enable you to make necessary changes to your room rates based on your occupancy and other requirements.
Build a robust online reputation:
Your past guests’ reviews and feedback on your services influence future guests’ booking decisions. It is crucial as guests tend to listen to other guests who have already stayed at your hotel. If they speak good about you on online hotel booking platforms, you stand a chance to attract more guests. Moreover, you can even increase your room rates. In other words, good ratings allow you to sell rooms at a competitive rate. This also plays a significant role in improving your hotel’s occupancy.
Whether creating packages, tweaking room rates based on length of stay or implementing dynamic pricing, you would need an all-in-one multi-property management solution to accomplish everything that leads to increased occupancy rates at your chain hotel. However, everything boils down to one “the most important” thing – serve your guests better to exceed their expectations. You need to make them feel special and valued when they are at your property. You take care of them; they will take care of you.
