Category: Hotel Channel Management

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Are you using Metasearch Channels for your hotel distribution yet?

Metasearch sites help travelers compare hotel rates from various online travel agencies and other booking sites in one place. Metasearch, as a sales channel, is growing in the travel ecosystem. Travelers today want technology that offers information at the click of a button. Metasearch offers just that, by aggregating rates and availability across multiple OTAs and brand websites onto one screen, thus making comparison easy and decision making simpler.

Today, it is important for hotels to be visible on metasearch sites to increase direct bookings and visibility, thereby generating more revenue. You might be thinking – why do I need to add one more channel to my distribution mix? Here’s why –

Metasearch allows for more direct bookings

While OTAs continue to lead the third party sales booking, they have one very big disadvantage for hoteliers – bookings are made exclusively through the merchant site, for which the brand will pay a nominal fee.

Metasearch sites allow visitors to book either through OTAs or through the brand website, helping to increase direct sales for hotels if they are listed on the metasearch. Metasearch sites such as TripAdvisor have been criticized for favoring OTAs with which they have a partnership, but direct hotel booking information is available, which is more than can be said for OTAs themselves.

Traditional search is a dying breed

Metasearch might still be kept in the back burner when compared to traditional searching, but reports show that search statistics on these sites are up by 13 percent in recent years and are continuing to grow. In this age of technology, traditional search is a dying breed, as more and more internet users opt to take advantage of the features of metasearch sites, that traditional search simply cannot offer.

In utilizing metasearch channels, hotels can remain modern and relevant, and can widen and diversify their audience.

Rate comparison can work in favor of hotels

The core concept of metasearch channels is that they offer multiple hotel comparison – a feature that OTAs typically do not offer.

Believe it or not, comparison isn’t solely based upon price. For example, it has been found that an estimated 71 percent of users look at basic information, while 67 percent of users compare photographs. Comparison may seem daunting, but it’s actually a good chance to show off.

Upgrading to two-way connectivity can help you improve your channel content, by making it quicker and easier to update multiple channels with up-to-date information regarding the establishment.

With meta search considered to be one of the biggest marketing techniques of the year, there has never been a better time to add these channels to your distribution portfolio. Make sure you choose to work with connectivity advisors that provide relevant channels to get it right the first time.

In essence, metasearch channels save time and money for guests in their travel booking journey, while offering a robust distribution platform for hotels to improve visibility and direct booking revenue.

Connect to metasearch channels like Google, TripAdvisor, Trivago, HotelsCombined, Skyscanner & Escapio. Update them directly from your RateTiger channel manager to improve your direct hotel revenue! Book a demo today – https://bit.ly/2HiEzJp

 

 

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5 Best Ways to Make Your Hotel Service Sought After through the Search Engines

When a traveller wants to find a hotel, they try online options and take help of the search engines like Google or maybe Bing. These search engines provide reviews, rates of different rooms, location of the hotel and the data on vacant rooms. The hotel business owners would therefore like more visibility for their website and the information regarding the hotels.  The best way is to turn to search engine optimization ways and improve the ranks of the site.

Hotel Service

1) Optimization of the site through search engine

The online business owners work with the strategy of bringing their site to a better ranking position of the search engine. This gets the pages of the website of the hotel more visibility and takes care of the complex algorithms of the search engines. The site of the hotel is optimized when more people land into its pages and gather the information provided in various contents of the pages. They find it fruitful and come back for more and this way increase the ranking.

2) Site must be for the readers and users

When one wants such higher ranking for their websites, they should check on the loading of the pages of the site and its contents.  The site should also be mobile friendly to bring in more users to its pages. You should check the contents of the site from the user’s point of view and make them as user friendly as possible. This will bring more users for the site pages.

3) Make your content more relevant

The website’s content is the main thing on which the users would like to depend. This is the reason why the content should be updated at regular interval and the information, text or images of the web pages must be reliable and effective to the topic that is being discussed. The blog that is regarding your business would bring in more interested people to your site and when you provide high quality content that is helpful or interesting for the reader, they make it a point to visit your site regularly.

4) Connect through local search engines

The site that you develop should be good with the local search engines. This helps the bigger search engines like Google to optimize the sites that are doing well with the local search engines. You can create a page for your business through Google and add the name of your property to the virtual directory. You can add the contacts of your business and also keep those details in your websites too. This will help optimizing your site.

5) Building of links can be helpful for optimizing

The sites can include in its pages both incoming links and links that connects to other pages. The SEO service providers will tell you how these links can improve the footsteps in your site. The links that will bring in viewers from other popular sites of the same genre can be real good for your new site. You will do good to include links into your site content from other sites to make your site a better place for gathering information.

Get more traffic through sharing from social media

The simple step of sharing your pages through the profiles of social media can be real effective way to get direct traffic. This will encourage people who are interested in the topics of your website – to land into your pages. You can also connect the Hotel Directories, Google Places and various other digital platforms so that your website gets more visibility through any of the digital pages. You will find more like minded people pouring into your website to go through the information and content provided.

 Reviews from Google users can improve your ranking

The review from customers has been given more and more important from the search engine Google.  The developers find these reviews bring in more customers and viewers for the website and hence it plays most important role in improving the ranking of a site. Hence the hotels that want a better ranking should encourage their customers to provide positive and truthful reviews.

Get Hotel channel manager software at https://www.erevmax.com/ratetiger/ratetiger.html

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eRevMax completes integration with Vietnamese PMS ezCloud

Hotel connectivity expert eRevMax has completed 2-way integration with ezCloud, one of the leading PMS providers in South East Asia. Mutual hotel customers can now get the benefit of automatic distribution of availability and rate to third party online booking sites whenever they are updated in the property management system and receive reservations from OTAs seamlessly.

Ho Chi Minh City based ezCloud PMS is a popular property management system catering to 3000 hotels across Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia and recommended by leading hotel chains in the region. eRevMax’s distribution solutions are used by over 9000 hotels to update availabilities and rates across their booking channels and immediately update inventory across those channels when a booking is made.

“Real time OTA channel connection is a key feature of ezCloud PMS. eRevMax Channel Ecosystem offers the largest number of two-way interfaces, and hence will provide our hotel customers the ability to expand their distribution portfolio to reach out to larger audience,” said Nguyen Hoang Duong – CEO, ezCloud Technologies.

“This interface complements our continuous efforts to offer our hotel customers superior connectivity between their technology solutions and OTAs. South East Asia has been one of our growth regions, we are connected with some of the biggest OTAs and PMS providers in the region.  Being a preferred connectivity partner of ezCloud will further improve our portfolio. A greater number of hotels can now leverage the benefits of our Ecosystem while streamlining their distribution efforts,” said Ashis Saha, SVP – Project Management, eRevMax.

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Indonesian luxury villa improves online revenue with RateTiger

Black Penny Villas Ubud recommends Channel Manager and Shopper to optimize distribution

 Black Penny Villas, a boutique luxury property in Bali, has improved its online sales with eRevMax solutions. The property has experienced significant improvement in their operational efficiency leveraging RateTiger’s cloud based channel manager and on-demand shopping tool.

Ubud, in the uplands of Bali, is a popular destination for luxury travelers. Black Penny Villas, with its 10 units, have been leveraging eRevMax’s XML connectivity with global and regional OTAs, and niche channels. Hosted on LiveOS, RateTiger’s pool inventory model allows the revenue management team to continuously distribute its live rates and inventory to multiple booking channels and deliver updates back into its property management system (PMS) in real-time, without worrying about overbooking. The in-built booking trends and business analytics data combined with competitor benchmarking reports give them key market insights to make informed decision.

“We have been extensively using the Benchmarking Report to maintain parity rate across all OTAs. This coupled with real-time rate and availability on sales channels have resulted in better room production,” said Dewa Buda, Corporate Ecommerce Manager, Black Penny Villas Ubud.

“This recommendation is a testimony to our commitment to make online distribution management easy for hoteliers. We have invested in building stable connectivity with over 400 OTAs and technology providers. Our solutions simplify operations, improve efficiencies and give hoteliers time to focus on strategy,” said Mohnish Singh, Regional Sales Manager, eRevMax.

Meet our connectivity expert in your region – contact us today at marketing@erevmax.com to set up a meeting.

For more details, please visit http://www.erevmax.com

 

 

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A Corporate Retreat in the Scottish Highlands!

Corporate retreats are an integral part to the success of any organization. It is critical to sometimes step aside and relook at strategies and spend some quality time with colleagues outside of the workspace.

It was the Scottish Highlands calling for us this year and our retreat turned out to be the perfect combination of fun, team building and work epiphanies!

Without further ado, here are some glimpses of our Scottish sojourn – as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words!

A little change of scenery is often just what a business needs to invigorate productivity and company culture. Having clear goals and objectives, training and planning where all can be heard, coupled with fun and team bonding activities, are all important factors to create an effective and memorable corporate retreat. Here’s to our team spirit & bonding!

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Travel and Holidays – What Does the Future Hold in Store?

Every day, new marketing techniques and tools are launched almost every week – which increases the complexity of the marketing sector. Experts have different ideas and opinions about how holidays will be like two or three decades from now. The possibilities are limitless.

Virtual travel will be ‘in’:

Travel is likely to become virtual In the future. By the year 2050, holidays for most people will be about enjoying the popular as well as not so popular attractions of the world from the comfort of home. Time travel will be in, and it will be possible for travellers to visit New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina ravaged it or seeing the Pyramids right after their completion – all through virtual reality. They will be able to customize their surroundings and the weather, and also get a digital tour guide. They can also make situational or hypothetical travel – such as visiting the Taj Mahal without the tourists. This will help them remove the stress of travel without needing to visit the locations actually.

Travel and Holidays

More personalized travel experience:

Travel brands, in order to get brand recognition and loyalty, need to make use of customer data in such a way that shoppers can get value. The travel marketing techniques are likely to be made more personalized to help customers find the most relevant travel products and ideas for their choices – whether it comes to room, hotel, airline, airport or occupancy duration type.

Smarter Retargeting:

While retargeting has existed for quite a few years, it is expected to see more innovation. Travel companies will use live user session user profiling in real-time, which would allow a smarter retargeting that offers more relevant recommendations and information to users. For travel brands, it can increase the ROI significantly on every interaction.

Use of Chatbot technology:

Travel brands are making increasing use of the chatbot technology from companies such as Amazon, Expedia and Skyscanner, in an attempt to pre-empt the purchase requirements of customers. The use of Cortana or Alexa can be expected sooner rather than later.

Use of PWAs (progressive web apps):

These come with all the good things about mobile websites and mobile-based applications. These are delivered online and act just like native apps. PWAs help sell holidays quickly and form an important part of the overall user experience. The programs also operate in areas with inferior connectivity or in those spots where connectivity drops and comes – as in cars or trains. These will help travellers on the move.

Get Hotel booking channel manager software at https://www.erevmax.com/ratetiger/ratetiger.html.

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eRevMax appoints new Senior Vice President to head operations

Josef Lapka to spearhead product innovation, commercial operations and product delivery

eRevMax, the hospitality technology solution expert, today announced the appointment of Josef Lapka as the Senior Vice President – Operations. In his new role, Josef will lead the company’s operations and be responsible for executing the company’s operational and growth strategy with immediate effect.

A highly accomplished travel technology executive, Josef brings over 17 years pivotal experience in technology and development with 7 years’ experience specific to the realm of hospitality technology and operations. He joins eRevMax from HotelREZ Hotels and Resorts, where, as the Executive Director, he was responsible for daily operations and strategic expansion. As eRevMax further innovates and ventures into new hospitality technology territories, Josef’s role will be crucial in spearheading the company into the next chapter of product innovation and growth while improving the commercial operations and product delivery.

“As we focus on our product portfolio expansion and technology integration, Josef, with his leadership skills, business acumen and industry foresight, is the right person to align eRevMax’s next generation hospitality technology solutions with industry-leading operational practices. He is uniquely qualified to drive strategic prioritization and accountability within the organization, with a laser-focus on operational excellence,” said Reuel Ghosh, Group CEO – eRevMax.

“I am excited to join eRevMax at a time where it is setting new benchmarks in the hospitality technology space,” said Josef. “We have a talented team and the technological backbone to deliver on our promise of delivering gold standard of connectivity, solutions and services to our customers and partners.”

Josef completed his Master’s in Digital Media and IT from the University of Portsmouth, UK. Besides his native Czech, he is fluent in English and German. He will be based out of London, UK, with time spent in eRevMax’s core global locations in Orlando, Kolkata and Bangalore.

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How Metasearch is relevant

 

Metasearch helps travelers compare hotel rates from various online travel agencies and other booking sites in one place. In metasearch sites, hotels and online travel channels publish their rates and availabilities.

Travelers today are more information savvy than ever and researches their travel meticulously. Their planning, especially for hotel booking, begins at OTAs and metasearch.  Spending a few minutes updating profile on Meta sites can increase bookings and can generate more revenue for hoteliers.

 Meta Search Allows for Direct Bookings

Two of the largest OTAs, Booking.com and Expedia’s online advertisement spent more than that of all hotel brands combined. While traditionally, hotels spend around 8% of their budget on marketing, for OTAs, it is over 50%. Getting attention of travelers on the complex world of online, where PPC rules, has become increasingly challenging for hoteliers. It is here, metasearch comes into play.

Metasearch sites allow for visitors to book either through OTAs or through the brand website. Working on the CPC model, the rates are displayed with emphasis given to highest bidders. Hotels pay when someone clicks on the link. Metaseach sites like TripAdvisor and Google also, in addition, offer the CPA model where hotels pay the channels a commission whenever a traveler books from their brand website.

Metasearch is still holding strong

In recent time, Booking.Com and Expedia has substantially cut down their metasearch ad spent. While this move led to some debates over the viability of metasearch, in my opinion, this gives hotels a unique advantage to drive more direct bookings. MReports show that meta search statistics are up by 13 percent in recent years and are continuing to grow.

In utilizing meta search channels, hotels can remain modern and relevant, and can widen and diversify their audience.

Comparison Features can be Beneficial

A popular feature of meta search channels is the availability to compare select hotels against each other – something that OTAs typically does not offer.

Believe it or not, comparison isn’t solely based upon price. For example, it has been found that an estimated 71 percent of users look to basic information, while 67 percent of users compare photographs. Comparison may seem daunting, but it’s actually a good chance to show off.

Upgrading to two-way connectivity can help you improve your channel content, by making it quicker and easier to update multiple channels with up-to-date information regarding the establishment.

With meta search considered to be one of the biggest marketing techniques of the year, there has never been a better time to add these channels to your distribution portfolio. Make sure you choose to work with digital marketing specialists with relevant channel connections to get it right the first time.

Connect to metasearch channels like Google, TripAdvisor, Trivago, HotelsCombined, Skyscanner & Escapio. Manage them via RateTiger. Improve your direct hotelrevenue!

Book a demo today – https://goo.gl/3gKUJZ

 

 

 

 

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5 things to look for when you select your PMS

 

Technology is always evolving. The times of spreadsheet and manual data entry has long been replaced with automated hotel management systems. With the emergence of cloud platform, big data, mobile and virtual payment – technology has become vital to hotel’s daily operations.

A property management system, commonly known as PMS, has been developed to streamline the front office and daily operations like invoicing, room inventories, housekeeping, check-ins, check-outs, etc. Advanced PMS often goes beyond the basics, and offers features and capabilities that become centerpiece of the hotel’s business. Here’re five essentials you need to check when you next select for PMS.

Integration with Channel Manager

Online booking has become the biggest source of revenue for the hotel industry. While direct booking is the most profitable demand source for a property, online sales channels and meta-sites have become critical to every hotel’s distribution mix. A hotel PMS which is integrated with your channel manager and booking engine, will enable the reservation synchronization completely automated. Whenever a guest books your room online, the reservation will be immediately delivered and updated in your hotel system, thereby minimizing the chances of overbooking.

Cloud Technology

Cloud technology, which essentially means web-based tools and applications, as opposed to a an installable one, eliminates dependency on in-premise hardware, and allows the user to manage the solution by login in from different computers or connected devices. The cloud-based PMS are usually more stable with data security, backups and real-time updates. The web-based UI are intuitive and reduces time and cost for training. Advanced cloud-based PMSs have API capabilities, making integration with other hotel technology applications easier.

POS Outlets

Most hotels have multiple on property point-of-sale outlets like gift shop, restaurant, bar, spa etc. Maintaining manual entry can not only be complex, there would always be a chance of overlooking a transaction. A PMS with integrated point-of-sales automate the entire process by keeping track of every transaction and smooth check-out experience of the guest.

Real-time Business Analytics

Hotels today use about 10-12 technology solutions for their daily operations which often work in silos. Your PMS should have the capability to bring all your data pertaining on to a single dashboard so that anyone with access to the platform can sue and make informed decision. An integrated hotel management platform which unifies all operation tools like PMS, OTA, Channel Management, Market Intelligence, Review Management etc and allow for the integration of external tools, channels, and vendors – provides hotels an opportunity to leverage technology holistically.

Ease of Use

Technology, even the high-tech ones, can be user friendly. An intuitive solution is the one which is simple and easy to use and based on things that people already understood. The hotel PMS should be management software should be simple and can be managed without extensive training.

Whether a guest books a room online or with a tour operator, your PMS stays updated through RateTiger. Contact us today – marketing@erevmax.com

 

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Bellevue Hotels & Resorts using RateTiger Web on LiveOS to manage online sales for 4 properties

Philippine hotel chain the Bellevue Hotels & Resorts has recommended RateTiger for centralizing online distribution. All four properties of the group have begun using RateTiger on LiveOS  platform earlier this year and certifies it to be ‘the best friend’ for hotels.

The Bellevue Hotels and Resorts manages luxury and midscale hotels across Philippines. The revenue management team is managing premiere properties such as the Bellevue Manila and the Bellevue Resort Bohol along with midscale properties in Alabang and Quezon City with its B Hotels. With its diverse guest profile which include luxury, midscale, leisure and business travellers, the team was grappling with the online distribution.

They turned to RateTiger Channel Manager and On Demand Shopping available on LiveOS, the hospitality operating platform by eRevMax. RateTiger’s XML connectivity with over 350 online sales channels including OTA, GDS, metasearch and wholesalers gives the hotel group the opportunity to boost reservations and revenue and attract larger segments of both the corporate and leisure markets it caters for.

“The most important feature for me is RateTiger Channel Manager. Being able to view all 4 properties at one time on LiveOS has a great impact for me in terms of time and efficiency. The “smart fill” feature works like magic! I just use this field, and in 2 steps, all my different room categories would be live and bookable!” said Annie Bisuna, Revenue Director, The Bellevue Hotels and Resorts.

They are also extensively using On-Demand-Shopping tool to generate a real-time rate shopping report as-and-when they require to keep up with the fast pace business movement. RateTiger Shopper captures all its competitors’ rate data across hundreds of websites instantly and delivers granular analysis to monitor market dynamics on time.

“Rate Tiger is my new best friend. We hang out most of the time – that is during duty hours, share secrets by showing rates of our competitors through their Shopping on Demand tool and gives advise on how to position our properties in terms of pricing with the objective of maximizing revenue. I am truly satisfied having the chance to do partnership with Rate Tiger and would highly recommend to other hotels,” said Annie Bisuna, Revenue Director, The Bellevue Hotels and Resorts.