Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) can be super beneficial for your business. These sites are an easy and low-lift way to gain more bookings for your hotel and offer a potentially steady revenue stream. 

However, this seemingly simple way to boost hotel occupancy should really only be a supplement to your business strategy. The real key to long-term success is through Direct Bookings. 

Here are the top eight reasons why Direct Booking should be your main goal

1. Higher and More Immediate Revenue

Those OTAs are eating away at your potential revenue! Some of the most popular ones charge up to 30% on commission fees. When customers book directly all the revenue stays with you. Not only that, but OTAs usually have a delayed payment system, with direct bookings there is no wait. 

2. Reduce Unnecessary Third-Party Ad Spending

As with any business, OTAs main priorities are to make a profit. Not only do they take away your revenue through bookings, but many also encourage you to spend more money to appear higher in their searches as a promoted or sponsored hotel. This is particularly costly if you are competing with large chains. 

3. Access to Guest Data

In marketing, data is invaluable. When guests book through an OTA you lose access to email addresses and contact information (which the OTA can limit to you and then they get to keep). 

When guests book directly you can decide the type of information you want to collect and analyse. This then can be used for targeted marketing, promotions, improvements, and building an overall deeper guest relationship which potentially increases returning guest rates. 

4. Control Over Guest Experience 

With direct bookings you have immediate access to the customer, so if there are any service issues they can be swiftly resolved by your team. 

Often with OTAs if there is an issue the customer must go through them, which means if the issue isn’t handled correctly this could harm your hotel’s reputation. 

5. More Upselling Opportunities 

When a customer books directly, you now have an added advantage of being able to upsell to them. You can contact them about adding Extras to their booking or create a package of tailored experiences. 

6. Customisable Pricing, Promotions, and Offers

When customers choose you over OTAs you can reward that choice with special direct booking-only prices, promotions, and offers that they can only get through you. 

7. Increased Guest Loyalty

By establishing a direct connection with guests, there is an easy way to entice them to become repeat customers that OTAs don’t offer. Create a Loyalty programme and introduce this to guests from the get-go. 

8. Lower Cancellation Rates

Direct bookings tend to have lower cancellation rates compared to OTA bookings, as guests are often more committed when booking directly. According to a recent study direct bookings have a cancellation rate of 18% when compared to OTAs which can have as high as a 40% cancellation rate. 

At Profitroom, we want to enable you to obtain more direct bookings, but still keep your valuable connection with OTAs. 

Enter Direct Only with Profitroom’s Channel Manager

Profitroom’s Channel Manager is your hotel’s way to manage all your booking channels in one place. You can link your OTAs and decide how you want to allocate rooms and offers to these online agents. 

However, you can further enhance your chance of direct bookings in the Channel Manager with our Direct Only feature.  

You have two ways of doing this under Rates & Availability -> Restrictions:

1. Enable Direct Only

When Direct Only is clicked to Enabled you are able to only sell your rooms through your Booking Engine and this closes your connected OTAs. You can select this option for a specific date or date range (say, for a peak season where you would prefer direct bookings). You can stop the Direct Only option by clicking Disabled.

2. Set Activation Threshold for Direct Only

You also have the possibility to open a Direct Only threshold. This means that when a certain amount of rooms are sold through OTAs, your system will be triggered to only allow direct bookings past the point you set. For example, if you want to make sure that 5 rooms in a specific category are direct only, the system will stop the OTA option once there are only 5 rooms remaining, leaving customers just the option to book directly. You can easily disable this feature with the Disable the activation threshold button. 

Increase revenue and reduce over reliance on OTAs with Direct Only! If you’re ready to take control of your bookings, contact us!