How To Boost Your Direct Bookings RECAP S1E6

Foreign. Welcome to the final episode in the first series of the Boost Hospitality podcast. Now, as you may know hopefully by now, we've released five episodes prior to this covering all sorts from website, TripAdvisor, online travel agents, email marketing and social media. The aim of all of this was to release five episodes under 10 minutes with easy actionable tips so you can boost your direct bookings and get more heads on beds in your hotel, guest house and holiday cottages. I really hope that you have taken action and you have done at least one of the five little hacks and tips and tricks that I have given to you over the last course of last five episodes. What I wanted to do on the this episode is just recap on a few things that we've gone through and I want to open it up to you guys to get in contact with me to let me know exactly what you've done and how it has affected your business. So go back to episode one and we talked about your website, your homepage. This is the gateway to your property. This is the massive deciding factor on whether a guest books with you or if they book with somebody else. So what we looked at on that episode was how to make your website clean. If your homepage is clean and there is easy places to go, look at your rooms, it is very visible on how someone can call you and book with you. That is the key. So the takeaway from that one was to add your phone number, nice big bold letters and numbers on there to make sure that when someone comes on their site and they are sure they want to book with you, they've got a phone number on how they can do. So don't forget that if someone goes down the online route and the booking route, there's more chance of them going to an online travel agent to complete their booking or by going somewhere else. You want to get people on your website and keep them there and by giving them a phone number so that they can call you if they get stuck. That is key. Secondly, we talked about TripAdvisor and how by having their Good TripAdvisor page, by having a Active TripAdvisor page, this can actually help improve your bookings as well. So the takeaway from that was to respond to the last 10 reviews on your page. Now if you haven't yet got 10 reviews, just respond to everyone you know. It'll take 10 minutes, but keep it short, sharp and sweet. Don't just copy and paste, make it personal to a point, but. But don't make it into an essay. Respond to Those reviews and that will be a massive indicator moving forward on getting your bookings. Next, we talked about the online Travel Agents, the OTAs, Booking.com, expedia, Laterooms, Agoda, you name it, we covered them all. And what I wanted you to do on that was to add photos. Not only that, but tag the photos accordingly. So explain which one is a bedroom, which one's a bathroom, image, a dining room, that can go a long way. And also what I want you to do was to work out the 8020 rule. So after you set all of your OTAs up and you've got your basic listing all done, give it a couple of weeks, see which ones are driving bookings which aren't, make full use of your account manager and work out the 8020 rule. For those of you who don't know, it is the 20% of actions that you take drive 80% of your income. So in this world of OTAs, which 20% of online travel agents are driving 80% of your bookings, if it turns out that booking.com is driving 80 bookings out of 100, focus on them. Give your account manager a call and invest more time, more effort, more money into making sure that you get more bookings from those guys. Next, we talk about email marketing. Now, in my opinion, out of all the five episodes, this is the most important. Why? Because it is the easiest and most effective way of increasing direct bookings for years to come. If you haven't yet listened to this episode, I would recommend you going back and listening it right now. The takeaway from that was to email 10 guests. That episode goes into detail of what you can do when you're emailing those guests and why it is so important. And we then spoke about social media and we talked about how by keeping your social media account social and not selling, you will actually sell more rooms. It's quite ironic. The takeaway from that was that if you and what I want you to do was to go and take a selfie of yourself in front of your property, post it to your social media channel and write a short message and keep it interactive. Again, if you can do the last two right and do it consistently right and be ever present, you will keep in your guests eye line. You're keeping your guests for so when they are looking to make a booking in your local town, they don't go anywhere else. They already know exactly where to go. They know who to call, they know who to email. They're not going back on booking.com and booking with you. Again, via them, they're going directly to you. And that is the whole point and key and the whole reason why I did this podcast is that if you do these five steps right, you will increase your direct bookings. It's a no brainer. What I want now is I want you to tell me exactly what you've done. So after this podcast, open up your computer, email markoostly.co.uk. let me know which of the five steps you did, what happened, what did you like about it, what did you not like about it, what you struggled, what you found easy and let me know the outcome, how it increased your direct bookings, did it get a booking? Did it get an inquiry? What did you find from doing these tips? Email markoostly.co.uk I'll spell it out for you, Mark. B O-O-S-T-L-Y.co.uk or get in contact on Twitter, it's oostleyuk. So I just want to take this time out to say thank you so much for listening to all these episodes. I know that time is a big commodity in the hospitality world. I've been there, I've done that. You don't get much of it. That's why I wanted to keep every episode under 10 minutes, as best as I possibly could do, so that it's something you can listen to whilst in the car, changing the bedrooms, cooking breakfast, you name it, doing the accounts. I wanted to keep it short, sharp and sweet because I know that you've not got time to listen to hours of podcast, you've only got time to listen to one, if that. I released it all in one go, purely for testing. Nobody else has done it before and I wanted to see how it's gone down. So I'd love to hear your feedback if you would be so kind to now go onto itunes and leave a review, share it with your friends. Just tell one person about this podcast, it will be good for years to come. So you can tell them now, which is being recorded in 2016, but this is something that people can be doing in 2017, 18, 19, 20, 20. So hopefully people won't wait when you, when you listen to this, whenever you listen to this, you can take this action and put it onto your property. So to sign off, my name is Mark Simpson, I'm founder of Boost Hospitality, or Boostly for short. I'd love you to go and find out more information about us and if you would like us to help you with your marketing, please give me an email, a call a message, a Facebook, a tweet, you name it, a WhatsApp, and I'll book in a consultation with you. But until next time, until next series, thank you so much for listening. Bye. Bye.