Five thousand word hotel OTA operation complete solution, with practical operation guide
01
Hotel OTA promotion concept
OTA itself is a bridge connecting guests and hotels. With strong marketing capabilities, rich product information, convenient booking methods, fast payment methods and guaranteed payment policies, OTA has gathered many members, bringing many The source of tourists has also become the brand marketing, display and promotion channel of the hotel.
1. The concept of OTA
OTA, the full name of Online Travel Agency, translated as “online travel agency” in Chinese, is a professional term in the tourism e-commerce industry, which refers to the travel consumer booking travel products or services from the travel service provider through the Internet, and paying online or offline. , that is, each tourism subject can conduct product marketing or product sales through the Internet.
- The meaning of OTA
The emergence of OTA has put the original traditional travel agency sales model on the network platform, which has more extensive transmission of route information, and interactive communication is more convenient for customers to consult and order.
- Representatives of domestic OTAs
The representatives of domestic OTAs are: Ctrip.com, Qunar.com, eLong.com, Tongcheng.com, Meituan.com, Lvmama Travel.com, Baiku.com, Letu.com, Sou.com, Tuniu.com and Easy Tour. The world, happy e-line travel network, camel travel network and so on.
2. Marketing changes of hotels under the OTA model
The OTA model has changed the traditional hotel marketing model, and hotels are actively using the online marketing model to carry out online ordering under the OTA model. The details are as follows.
- Mobile Marketing
Under the OTA model, hotel marketing presents the characteristics of mobility. Customers can communicate and negotiate with hotels through mobile devices, and order hotel services through mobile networks.
- Personalized Marketing
Homogeneous hotel services are becoming less and less attractive to consumers, and hotels actively pay attention to the research and development of personalized service products. In addition, the Internet provides a large amount of data information for the hotel. The hotel can understand the personalized needs of consumers through data analysis, and predict the future consumption direction of consumers according to consumer behavior, and then produce personalized service products.
- Integrated Marketing
Finally, the OTA model enables the integration of hotels and travel agencies, and many OTA companies have invested in hotel companies. Moreover, hotel companies are also actively entering travel websites.
02
Marketing strategy of hotels under OTA mode
In the market environment where OTAs occupy huge traffic resources, the hotel industry should view OTAs with a positive and rational perspective, adopt certain strategies, and make full and rational use of OTA distribution channels to positively enhance the hotel’s exposure and reputation, avoid the erosion of interests to the greatest extent, and at the same time pass Drainage opens up its own channels to improve room revenue.
1. Create a hotel WeChat self-media platform
Hotels urgently need a direct way to communicate with customers, and the WeChat platform can directly deliver hotel service information to customers in the form of information push, guide customers to re-consume and form hotel loyalty members.
2. Building a hotel alliance
In order to cope with OTA’s control of traffic, powerful hotel chains are also conducting a series of mergers and acquisitions to build hotel alliances
For example, Jin Jiang Hotel entered into a shareholder agreement with Jin Jiang Co., Ltd., Jin Jiang Capital, Lianyin Ventures, Tibet Hony, Guosheng Investment and investors who met the agreed conditions, and jointly invested 1 billion yuan to build Wehotel and establish a hotel alliance.
Doing so is conducive to resource integration, effectively improving operational efficiency and reducing service costs. The most important thing is to be able to integrate the member information of all hotels, gradually build a huge network with hundreds of millions of members, and finally create a sharing economy platform based on mobile Internet.
3. In-depth cooperation with OTA
In order to enhance the experience of offline hotels, OTA selects some powerful high-star hotels and cooperates with them in depth.
For example, Royal Court Hotel Group, Meihao Hotel Group, Evergrande Hotel Group and Guangdong (International) Hotel Group have chosen to upgrade their strategic cooperation with Ctrip to improve the new hotel ecosystem.
As the market and consumer habits change, hotels should keep pace with the times, keep booking channels optimized, and maximize hotel revenue. While strengthening its own mobile phone online booking and membership system, it is in the interests of hotels to strategically cooperate with OTAs according to local conditions. Leverage Ctrip’s membership advantages and aggregation effect as a leading OTA in China, and serve as an effective supplement to the hotel’s diversified booking channels to achieve a win-win situation for consumers, hotels and OTAs.
Fourth, strengthen self-transformation construction
The traditional hotel business model can no longer meet the needs of customers. Hotels need to actively and comprehensively understand customer preferences, speed up the transformation, keep up with the development trend of hotels, and cater to customers’ consumption tastes.
For example, in order to enhance personalization and experience, Japan has created a bookstore-style theme hotel. When guests are tired of reading books, they can sleep in the sea of books.
5. Adopt a proactive marketing strategy
Online marketing is constantly evolving, which means that hotel marketing strategies must also keep up with the latest digital trends and algorithmic improvements. Marketing teams should always focus on actively managing the overall online marketing strategy and optimizing marketing advantages. It is unrealistic to expect a sudden surge in website traffic just by maintaining the website and optimizing keywords. Success is measured by how active the marketing strategy is and whether the brand has a sustainable presence in various channels
6. Participate in the construction of urban smart projects
For the development of tourism, the governments of some advanced tourism regions have led the construction of smart cities, which is a rare opportunity for hotels, restaurants and other businesses. Intelligence is the inevitable trend of the hotel industry in the future, and as a smart city As a member, the hotel is backed by the brand tree of smart tourism city, which will naturally attract more customers. At the same time, the hotel can mobilize its own resources and integrate differentiated resources to serve the surrounding communities, institutions and groups. In addition to accommodation, the community can share the hotel and surrounding catering, entertainment, fitness and other services, and the smart community is in sight.
7. Use hotel smart management software
Now, if you walk into a restaurant or hotel business casually, you can experience the convenience brought by the management system to the hotel. The management system is powerful, with basic functions such as customer management, evaluation query, service display, one-key payment, WeChat hosting, data statistics, consumer payment, peripheral information recommendation, etc., helping hotels reduce management costs and improve operating income.
03
Disadvantages of hotel marketing under OTA mode
The relationship between hotels and OTAs can be described as a love-hate relationship. Both parties have a mutually beneficial relationship, and there is an inevitable conflict of interest. On the one hand, the OTA can provide a large number of orders for the hotel; on the other hand, the hotel is not willing to pay a large amount of commission to the OTA. Therefore, conflicts between the two parties are inevitable. At present, the problems of hotel marketing under the OTA model:
A single marketing channel
Under the OTA model, most hotels have carried out online marketing. However, due to the late start of hotel network marketing and the lack of professional network marketing talents in hotel enterprises, hotel network marketing can only be carried out by cooperating with network middlemen.
For example, most of the websites have settled in the booking website, and published advertisements on the well-known booking websites for advertising and marketing. In this case, the hotel’s official marketing website is not sound enough, and even many hotel companies have not opened their own official website, and the marketing channel is single.
2. Limited marketing capabilities
The human resource management of hotel enterprises attaches great importance to the training of technical talents, sales talents and management talents, but lacks the emphasis on network marketing talents and does not introduce sufficient network marketing professionals. Moreover, most hotel network marketers only understand the relevant knowledge and skills of marketing, lack of understanding of network marketing knowledge, and limited network marketing capabilities.
Third, the network payment is not perfect
Under the OTA model, hotel marketing needs to be paid through the Internet or paid on the spot. And the network payment method is not mature enough, and the network security cannot be guaranteed. Consumers are vulnerable to malicious attacks in the process of online payment, resulting in the leakage of credit card information or personal information.
4. Disconnection between online and offline marketing
Under the OTA model, many hotels deal with online marketing business and offline marketing business separately, resulting in a disconnect between online and offline.
For example, some customers did not contact the hotel in time after booking, and the hotel did not process the online reservation in time, and the hotel did not reserve a room for the customer after arriving at the hotel, which intensified the conflict between consumers and the hotel.
04
How to do OTA data operation well
In an era of hotels everywhere, in the face of such a highly competitive industry, many businesses have done enough work on how to get more traffic and exposure.
1. How to increase traffic
First of all, we must analyze the traffic of our store, and find the reason for the lack of traffic from the two aspects of exposure and exposure conversion rate.
- Understand the flow of our store
On the Data Center→Diagnostic Report→Daily page, merchants can see the real-time visitor volume of the day. To judge the level of hotel traffic, it is necessary to conduct horizontal and vertical comparisons over a longer period of time. On the Data Center→Market Analysis page, it provides an overview of the hotel’s overall traffic yesterday, the past 7 days, and the past 30 days. The hotel can also compare and view the average level of hotels in the competitive circle.
- PSI Quality Score
The PSI service quality score is the reflection of the hotel’s traffic competitiveness on Ctrip.
- Determine the direction of traffic increase
Traffic = Exposure * Exposure conversion rate. If the hotel traffic is lower than the average value of the competition circle, the merchant must analyze which link is the problem. Is it because the hotel is ranked at the bottom leading to the lack of exposure, or is there a problem with the listing page starting price, comments, and the first picture? Affects exposure conversion rate.
- Traffic Analysis
Merchants can check the traffic analysis page every day to understand the traffic situation obtained by the store yesterday, in the past 7 days, and in the past 30 days.
→ Traffic source analysis: To increase exposure, find out the traffic sources of a hotel on the traffic analysis page. If the main traffic source of a hotel is “screening and keywords”, “city search” generally accounts for a higher proportion of OTA traffic, but the traffic of this part of the hotel is only about 20%. To achieve a leap-forward increase in traffic, improving the city’s ranking is a breakthrough point for the hotel.
→Analysis of exposure conversion rate (list page to detail page): traffic analysis page →Cause analysis shows the advantages and disadvantages of our store compared with hotels in the competition circle in terms of starting price, pictures, and reviews, as well as suggestions for improvement. If the hotel exposure conversion rate is lower than the level of the competition circle, the gap with the competitors should be found in time and targeted optimization should be carried out.
2. How to optimize the hotel ranking?
Based on the above major factors that affect ranking, we can improve one by one. Although the hotel location distance usually cannot be changed, we can effectively improve the ranking by improving other ranking factors. The specific methods are as follows:
- Location distance
There must be perfect hotel location information, accurate text and accurate positioning! Do you know that the vast majority of users rely on this positioning to come to the door.
- Hotel Information
Improve various hotel information to ensure its authenticity and integrity. Continuously optimize hotel pictures, especially the real and beautiful header pictures are more important, each picture category has multiple photos for reference; ensure the contact number that can be dialed, detailed and accurate hotel details will improve the order conversion rate and customer satisfaction.
- Plan price
Give as much as possible, competitive quotations and a wide variety of room types, and maintain a stable supply of hotel rooms, so as to maintain a stable and continuous increase in hotel sales on the platform.
- Hotel Rating
Improve the service level, strive to improve the hotel rating, encourage users to give praise to the hotel, and encourage users to collect the hotel; avoid customer complaints, especially problems such as invoice problems, no room at the store, and price increase at the store.
- Activity Tab
Participate in daily specials, store new customers and other business activities, and issue business coupons to attract users; strive for event labels, and strive to be listed. When you don’t know what to do, you can communicate with the business manager more.
- Number of room nights
The room night volume is the embodiment of the hotel’s popularity on the platform. The hotel’s careful management will naturally be rewarded, and then enter a virtuous circle. To increase the hotel room night volume, the hotel must start from all aspects and improve the hotel’s operation level.
05
Hotel OTA Online Marketing Practice
There are three major indicators of OTA: exposure rate, browsing rate, and conversion rate. Doing a good job in OTA is not simply doing a good job of scoring, but a systematic job, which requires data analysis, and each data indicator complements each other. We should start from the key factors of the three major indicators of OTA:
1. Exposure rate
Practical ways to increase exposure
- Platform paid promotion
The fastest way to improve the ranking is to list, but the list needs to meet the platform’s revenue line. You can consider platform paid promotion such as pyramid, recharge pyramid for advertising, set advertising keywords, and participate in other advertising activities at the same time, so that more guests can experience the hotel.
- Event collocation settings
The platform will push different activities at different times, and it is not recommended for all room types to participate in the same activity. Instead, a reasonable combination of activities should be carried out, such as: participating in a 8.2% discount for new customers, and participating in daily specials for old customers, so as to avoid loss of old users who cannot participate in the event.
- SEO optimization of hotel name
Every hotel has a hotspot in the business district, such as hotels near the airport. The suffix “airport store” can be added to the name, which will increase the exposure of the hotel when guests search for the airport.
- Hotel business district
After the hotel is listed as a Ctrip Gold Medal, you can apply for a dual business district within 3 kilometers, so you must remember to apply with the business manager to increase the exposure.
- Price
The price of the platform has a range. For example, Ctrip will have below 150 yuan, 150-300, 300-450, 450-600 and above 600. The price of the hotel satisfies each range of the platform as much as possible, and consumers can search for your hotel no matter which range they choose.
- Attribute Tab
Some labels are applied through business, such as business travel, subway surrounding, etc. Some are obtained by participating in activities, such as daily specials. Many consumers pay attention to labels, so it is reasonable to participate in activities to get more labels to increase exposure.
- Scoring
Rating is a key factor affecting the ranking of hotels. Hotels with a score of 4.8 or higher are more popular with consumers. How to improve the rating? We should start with services and hotel facilities to effectively improve consumer experience, and consumers will naturally receive good reviews when they are satisfied. When many bosses encounter bad reviews, they will immediately consider how to delete them, which is definitely not acceptable. It is normal for the platform to have negative reviews. The key lies in how you respond and deal with it. The best way is to achieve publicity by replying to the content.
- Hotel Type
The supporting services and facilities must be authentic to avoid complaints from customers.
2. Viewing rate
Practical ways to increase your browsing rate
- The first picture of the hotel
The main purpose of the first picture is to attract consumers’ attention, and it must be different on the list page. For example, if the surrounding hotel uses the hotel’s peripheral environment as the first picture, then we can choose the room picture as the first picture to avoid consumers’ aesthetic fatigue.
- Number of ratings and reviews
It is also an important factor affecting the browsing rate, and guests prefer hotels with a score of 4.8 or higher. Remember not to swipe orders, the platform is prohibited. The front desk should guide guests to praise, fundamentally solve the problem of ratings, and actively adjust according to the guests’ suggestions, so as to form a virtuous circle.
- Drainage room types and booking popularity
Ctrip’s extranet will display the lowest room type, price, discount and room availability. Therefore, attention should be paid to the intensity of traffic drainage activities. The greater the activity, the more favored consumers will be. When the number of drainage rooms is less than 5, the external network will display only a few remaining rooms, which can achieve the purpose of hunger marketing. Consumers have a herd mentality. The higher the booking popularity, the more popular it is. Therefore, offline scanning, online promotion and other methods should be implemented to maintain the booking popularity.
3. Conversion rate
Practical ways to increase conversion rates
- The first picture of the room type
Try to set a panoramic picture of the room, remember not to use the picture of the bathroom.
- Price
You can use certain skills to set the price. For example, for a room of 158 yuan, if you set it to 258 minus 50, it will be more attractive to consumers.
- Arrival and departure time
It can be adjusted according to the occupancy rate of the hotel. For example, the occupancy rate is not very high, and the check-in time of the surrounding hotels is after 14:00. We can adjust it to after 12:00, thereby increasing the competitiveness of the hotel.
- Hotel Introduction
Don’t make a simple introduction, introduce your advantages as much as possible, such as the distance from the subway station, and show it from multiple angles.
- Cancellation Policy
Usually, it can be set as free cancellation before 18:00, and it can be set as paid cancellation on holidays.
- Hotel pictures
Remember that it must be true, otherwise it is easy to bring complaints
- Room type activities
Participate appropriately to increase exposure