Want to get the most from Expedia? Follow these 3 ultimate ways S4E4

Foreign. Welcome to Season four of the Boost Hospitality Podcast. I'm back again to show all hospitality owners how you can turn lookers into bookers, get more heads on beds and increase your direct booking this season I've got something very special lined up. The Boosterly website was recently voted one of the top 10 UK hotel blogs out there, and after asking you guys, I realized that so many of you haven't actually read the blogs. You said that you prefer audio as a way of learning about new tactics and tips to get in more direct bookings. So what I'm doing this season is I'm going to be providing the audio version of all of my blogs that are on the Boostly website. So it doesn't matter whether you're on the computer in the car getting ready for breakfast or changing those beds. I can show you how you can increase your diary books. Book let's get on with the show. Okay, so this episode is all about three useful Ways of Getting the Most from Expedia What I have noticed recently is that there's a lot of bookings coming into our property from Expedia. So I thought, as well as having the blog about booking.com that I will talk about in future episodes, let's put something together that can help you with Expedia. So number one, make sure you upload quality photos. It's the same as every listing site. When you first join Expedia, you've got the ability to upload photos to their platform. Unlike other websites, you are not given a chance to write a property description. So in Expedia it literally is that your photos are everything. It's very cliche, but a photo tells a thousand words. As I've stated in the past, it is essential that you upload high quality photos. Expedia will flag your property profile if you are uploading photos from a smartphone or an old camera and it's just not the best quality. Unlike Booking.com and TripAdvisor, you don't choose the order that your photos appear, so you get to choose your primary image. So make sure that this is your usp, your unique selling photo. You've got advanced options with Expedia. You can upload virtual tours or 360 imagery, but you have to get in contact with them directly. Make sure that your property management system is linked to Expedia, so the last thing that you want is for your rates to be different. More importantly, you run the risk of double booking bookings. I work with free to book and they automatically set up your listing for you, but some others, like Avivo and high level software, they might not do this. So make sure that your pms, your property management system is linked end of the day. It makes your life so much easier if you can control your rates and availability from one platform. A little top tip that I've done is adjust your check in time on all the OTAs to one hour after your usual check in time. So what does this mean? If you want to increase your direct bookings, not only do you have to look at your rates that you have to offer to online and offline guests, but also the incentives. So what we did at De Granary is that we put our check in time on all the online travel agents, Expedia and booking.com to 3 o'. Clock. Our check in time is 1 o'. Clock. So if you book directly with us, you get an earlier check in time. So what does this do? It gets into the customer's head. For example, they might want to come and stay and they may be coming to an event or for a wedding and they want to get in, they want to get their stuff in their room and they want to get out for the day. So to make the maximum use of their stay. And they see on the Internet that if they book with us directly via our website, phone call or email, they can get in earlier at one o' clock if they book in via an ota, sort of like they're being punished. And so in their mind, if there is any confusion of the benefits of booking with an OTA compared to booking with you directly, then little things like this just tip them over the edge to come to you. Like I said, you've always got to make it easy for a customer to book. And by doing this, you will slowly but surely turn the needle. Get more people away from Expedia, from booking.com, who, and coming to you. So these are three little tips that you can do. Just to recap. Adjust your check in time to be an hour or two hours after your usual check in time. Make sure your property management system is linked with Expedia, and make sure you use high quality photos. All right, that's the end of this episode. I hope you found it useful. If you want to share your tips and advice about Expedia and all the OTAs, please get in touch Mark at Boostly or send me a tweet or get in contact on Facebook if you want to find out more information. And if you want to read today's blog in full, go to boostly.co.uk and in the search bar, type in Expedia.