What is an Online Travel Agent? S1E3

Hello and welcome to the Boost Hospitality podcast. My name is Mark Simpson and I'm going to be your host. Our aim is to help you increase your direct bookings and to get more heads on beds. We're going to give you simple yet effective tools that you can put into place right now for your hotel, guest house or self let accommodation property. To find out more information or to see the show notes, go to www.boostly.co do podcast. Okay, let's get on with the show. In this episode we're going to talk about the very controversial online travel agents. What is an online travel agent? Booking.com, expedia. These are your online travel agents, the OTAs as they're otherwise known as. Now why are we talking about an OTA? Why are we talking about booking.com, why are we talking about Expedia? Very simply, one in three people will book via an online travel agent. Why? Well, it's easy, it's simple. They spend millions on millions of pounds every year on marketing. They have the best web developers, they've got the best guys in place that a consumer can go know and trust to put their information in and, and then get the property that they want. Why are they controversial? Well, what a lot of people don't realize is that they charge hotels, guest houses, holiday cottages, 10 to 20% commission for every booking. If you add that up over amount of time, that can result in thousands of tens of thousands of pounds or dollars or whatever currency you use for just purely passing a booking through to you. They do get a lot of flack. They are very controversial. When a booking goes well, fantastic. If anything goes wrong, they're the first to ignore you. And just, you know, the communication is very hard at times. Instead of sacking them off, instead of just not doing anything with them at all. However, I'm going to teach you to work a little bit differently with an ota. They are so essential they get the majority of the bookings out there. So you might as well be working with them instead of against them. First things first, really important, make sure you are on all the online travel agents. When I mean on, I mean you got to have a listing of at least one room on all the major players. You've got expedia, you've got booking.com, there's late rooms. Just do a simple Google search now and ask for all the online travel agents in your country. If you're not on these sites, then people will not be able to find you. So first things first, open up your Booking channel. Open up a piece of paper, an Excel sheet, anything, and just make a list of all the online travel agents that you're not on. What I want you to do is I want you to add and upload a listing to those ones. Then we're going to move on to the next one. So here's what I want you to do. Instead of being on, trying to work on all fronts, instead of trying to be on every OTA that is out there, instead focus on this, the 8020 role. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but in simple terms, focus on the 20% of the online travel agents that are bringing in 80% of your bookings. Don't waste your precious time, don't waste your effort trying to be on all of them. Instead, focus on the ones that are driving you the most bookings and work with them directly. So what does that mean? So say for example, out of 100 bookings that 80 of them have come from booking.com it is quite clear that booking.com is part of that 20% that's bringing 80% of your bookings. So you will focus on them and you will work with them. So maybe give them a call, speak to your account manager. If you don't have one, ask for one. They will know exactly how many bookings they are driving your way. They will want to work with you because the more time, the more they work with you, the more they're going to get some revenue as well. So speak to them. Ask them what else you can be doing to get higher in their rankings. What else you can be doing to be driving more bookings? Maybe arrange a meeting, maybe arrange a Skype call or a phone call where someone can just have a chat with you, walk you through your listing and increase those bookings and how to convert them to a direct booking next time. That is what we're going to cover on the next episode. How to get a customer through the door and then turn them into a direct booking next time. What you can be doing. As always, I like to leave you with a tip or a trick or a tool that you can do right now when the podcast ends straight away to help increase your bookings, get more heads on beds. This is the tip. What I want you to do is go to your booking channel booking website, booking manager and work out by running a report or by just looking at the bookings that are in front of you which of the online travel agents that you currently work with are driving you the most bookings. Pick one. So take the last hundred bookings. If you haven't got a lot of time, take the last 10 bookings, the last 20. Whichever one has brought you the most bookings through, give them a call and set up a one to one chat to see what you can be doing. Just give it a try. As always, let me know. Email markoostly.co.uk Boostly is spelled B O-O-S-Tly or Tweetleyuk. As always, I love to hear your feedback. Please let me know what you thought of this edition, what you've done, any experiences that you've had with online travel agents, let me know. I'd love to have a chat with you. Until next time, thank you very much for listening.