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Pegipegi , Veturis Travel and Jet2holidays join the eRevMax Channel Ecosystem

A host of popular destinations are beginning to ease Covid19 lockdown and border restrictions and are starting to welcome tourists back. Are you making your property visible on the right channels? Automate your hotel online distribution with RateTiger. Get competitive rate intelligence with RTShopper; and manage ARI & reservation delivery with RateTiger Channel Manager – all in real-time from a single platform!

Here are some of our newly connected channel partners leading in their specific markets. Get in touch if you are looking to expand your distribution connectivity and wish to connect to any of our 400+ OTA channel network.

Pegipegi

Pegipegi is one of the most popular online travel agencies in Indonesia. Launched in 2012, Pegipegi currently offers more than 25,000 hotels in Indonesia, 25,000 flight routes, as well as more than 2,800 train routes. Add them to your distribution network and increase online bookings.

Veturis Travel

Are you looking to attract business travelers? Headquartered in Spain, Veturis Travel is a global online wholesale travel agency with a presence in 90 countries. They delivered over 700,000 reservations last year and is trusted by over 25,000 agencies. Get your property listed now to grow your corporate booking share.

Jet2holidays

UK’s second largest holiday operator, Jet2holidays offer incredible value package holidays to over 60 destinations across Europe, the Mediterranean, the Canaries and beyond. With over a million holiday packages booked on this channel annually, you may consider adding Jet2holidays to your distribution network.

Are you looking to manage any new channel from your RateTiger powered by LiveOS platform? CONTACT US – https://www.erevmax.com/erevmax-contact.html

 

 

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Knowing your hotel channel manager in the post COVID world

Covid19 has changed the travel industry. With travel going south, hotel industry is being forced to make adjustments in the wake of plummeting occupancy. Facing an unprecedented crisis, hotels of all sizes across the world are desperately rethinking strategies as they plan to recover and rebuild.

Even as cost cutting becomes norm and investment on technology infrastructure is being scrutinized, technology is going to emerge as a hotelier’s trusted best friend when it comes to optimizing operational efficiency.

As travel slowly opens, the initial demand build-up is expected to come from local and domestic travel. This trend is being witnessed in markets like China where hotel occupancy is driven by staycation, drive-in and local travelers. Markets which have been dependent on international travelers are expected to take longer to recover than one with stronger domestic base.

This is the time for hoteliers to evaluate their online distribution mix. According to a recent report by Sojern, hotel bookings to Abu Dhabi within a 48km radius accounted for 77 percent of all bookings in April and domestic travel from Dubai accounted for 91 percent of searches and bookings within the same radius.

It is important to capitalize on the local channels. Hotels need to monitor their production data and upcoming booking trends to identify the more profitable channels. Effective channel management can assist hoteliers with both issues – by increasing visibility and allowing for variable rate changes between seasons.

The challenge for many hoteliers in managing these channels is to ensure accurate rates and inventory allocation to optimize each channel to increase sales and maximize revenue. It is necessary to have an effective hotel channel manager for every property. Proper channel management also needs a pooled inventory model. Pooled inventory makes sure that hotel rooms are simultaneously promoted across every channel with no concern of overbooking. It is now time to focus on strategies rather than updating channels. Along with finding out the right vendor for your distribution management, always check whether the provider is PCI and GDPR compliant.

Take complete control of your revenue and channel management strategy to control distribution costs and drive more direct bookings. Considered one of the best hotel channel manager in the market, RateTiger is integrated with more than 400 OTAs and working closely with 9000 hotels globally. It is the connectivity partner of choice for large hotel groups, mid-scale chains as well as independent properties in both luxury and budget segment worldwide providing solutions through its core product brands – RateTiger , LiveOS and AgentX101.

Connect with us for your connectivity needs to make the most of hotel online revenue- https://goo.gl/3gKUJZ

 

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Fighting Coronavirus: 5 short-term revenue generation tips for hotels

As the situation surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak continues to evolve, it’s time to join forces and participate in virtual discussions to learn new revenue sources for your hotel business.

5 short-term revenue generation tips –

– Self- isolation packages – Offer rooms for self-isolation stays in well sanitized rooms.

– Quarantine facility – Contact your local government health bodies to offer lodging and fooding to affected people in a 14-day quarantine package rate.

– WorkFromHotel space – Create a weekly package offering stay, all meals and hi-speed internet and promote to professionals who want to stay comfortably without worrying about daily chores.

– Extended Stay – Focus on offering extended stay packages at affordable rates with well sanitized rooms, meals and wi-fi included, to expats that might be staying in costly rented places and looking for alternative stay options.

– Brand visibility – Maintain your presence through social media and have regular contact with loyalty guests – as soon as people are ready to book, they will remember and reach out to you.

We are here for you! Together we are stronger.

Contact us on marketing@erevmax.com to set up a discussion with one of our revenue management and connectivity advisers.

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Top Tips to Choose the Best Hotel Channel Manager Software

In today’s multi-channel distribution landscape, the Hotel Channel Manager Software has been one of the most crucial solutions hoteliers have at their disposal. A Channel Manager typically update the rates and availabilities across connected channels at one go. The advanced ones having XML integration with OTAs also deliver reservations made on the sites and syncs inventory thereby minimizing chances of accidental overbookings. Find out what  to look for when selecting your next channel manager.

Top Tips to Choose the Best Hotel Channel Manager Software

Third Party Integration

Unless you plan to overhaul your entire technology solutions including your Property Management System (PMS), Revenue Management System (RMS) or Central Reservation System (CRS), check whether the Channel Manager you are planning to invest on has an integration with your hotel systems. A 2-way XML interface between your PMS and Channel Manager would ensure capturing and delivering reservations generated at OTAs to the property management system in real-time, thereby eliminating manual handling of reservation notifications. Similarly, if the Channel Manager is integrated with your RMS, then the rate recommendations suggested by the Revenue Management System could automatically extrapolate in your channel manager, making your pricing strategy error free.

Seamless Connectivity with Online Sales Channels

There are hundreds of Channel Managers available in the market. Only a few offer XML interface with OTAs. Having seamless integration with online sales channels require technology expertise. However, seamless connectivity between OTAs and your Channel Manager would facilitate real-time data transfer thereby ensuring inventories are always in sync.

For an optimal- distribution mix, you would need connectivity with a wide range of online distribution channels including global and regional OTAs, metasearch, niche channels, GDS, wholesaler and tour operators. The longer the list of channels provided by your Channel Manager, the wider could be your potential reach. Hence which checking on Channel Manager solutions, take a note of the number of off-the-shelf channels that the system if offering. Here’s a quick tip. Most advanced Channel Managers would have connectivity with hundreds of online channels. By looking at their channel eco-system, you can geta fair idea of the solution you are considering.

Automatic Pooled Inventory

Very few channel managers offer pooled inventory model which allows hotels to allocate your inventories across all your channels including Brand website at the same time. This essentially allows hotels to work with any number of channels thereby broadening their distribution network and exposure to new market.

Data and Analytics

A good Channel Manager would provide not only sales statistics, but also other important KPIs like booking pace, channel performance, price-point analysis for hotel revenue managers to stay on top of their business. Evaluate which Channel Manage provides you with insights on insights on booking volume, competitor analysis, market rate movement and other important parameters to identify top performing channels and make adjustments to their distribution strategy.

Payment and Data Security

One of the biggest challenges for the hotel industry today is to keep security in check. Since Channel Managers delivering reservations has access to credit card information, it is important to safeguard guests’ information from data theft and cyber fraud. It is recommended to opt for a PCI DSS Certified Channel Manager to ensure you customer card data is fully protected. Further, the solution also needs to be GDPR compliant for data and privacy protection,

Ease of Use

Simplicity is beautiful. Simplicity is loved. A product might have loads of features, but what’s the us eof those features if it’s too complicated to handle. From Microsoft Office to iPhone – most successful products share a common philosophy – they are incredibly easy to use.  The last thing an hotelier needs is to get confused with the complexities of a technology solution. Instead, when looking for your next Channel Manager, check how easy it would be to manage and how long would you need to spend every day to manage your online distribution.

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How Can Hotel Guest Reviews Boost Sales?

How Can Hotel Guest Reviews Boost Sales

Hotel business has always relied on word of mouth publicity. The experience is improved with the help of hotel guest reviews you can use the best approach and transform the feedback of guests into a vital piece of your overall sales strategy. Here are some ways that can help you to improve your hotel sales with hotel guest reviews-

Train staff and ask for reviews from guests

You can train staff for asking for guest feedback at the time of stay. Guests will interact with hotel staff and leave their feedback. It’s important to take note of that. Often the most trivial issue raised by a guest can trigger into a major backlash.  The most direct method often happens to be the most effectual one. Your staff have to be trained to ask for guest feedback at important moments during the stay of guests, so that you have enough time for responding, fixing any problem and getting a glowing testimonial. Also train your staff at restaurants and spas to try to get separate feedback from the guests. If you allow guests staying in outside properties to try your restaurants, it’s important for you to have higher ratings and open a new revenue stream.

Ensure guest feedback goes back to hotel team

Sound communication is among the keys to the success of the hotel industry, and it begins with your hotel staff. You have to consider going through reviews in hotel staff meetings every month or week, to ensure that things are under control and customer grievances addressed may be improved.  Interestingly, guests are more likely to book a hotel which responds to negative reviews. Hence, respond to all reviews, but more importantly negative ones. It shows your sincerity in dealing with criticism.

Boost your hotel service with guest reviews

Reviews, both negative and positive, can help your staff to take decisions before time to know how they can deal with some forms of complaints and have the entire team together. Reviews may be used as a powerful source for data aggregation. In case you can track surveys and reviews and analyze the same over a period, you can identify which areas guests feel the best. You can also know where there is any area of improvement.

Make use of technologies for guest feedback and reviews

Most OTAs today allow guests to post reviews. Along with TripAdvisor, Google and social media, tracking reviews from all travel websites can sometimes be tricky. Thanks to technologies, you can not only capture feedback , but aggregate, make an analysis of overall guest sentiment and respond . There are plenty of solutions available which can do that.

However, there are no short cuts. It is an evolving process that must start today! As we move towards the age of consumer-controlled brand conversations, hotels need to integrate customer feedback into their business approach and strategy planning.

Contact for Hotel Room Distribution Management System

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Is your PMS enough for distribution?

Channel Managers and Hotel Property Management Systems have been around for quite a few years now. Whether you are a real estate agency, a hotel, a B&B manager or the owner of some family properties, there are chances that you are looking for the type of software that can help you out the best. Here are some differences between Channel Management systems and Property Management Systems, which can let you understand such platforms better and take an informed decision.

Is your PMS enough for distribution

Purpose

Property Management Systems are a type of software system that is created to make daily operations management easier for real estate companies, hotels or rental agencies. The aim is to assign, schedule and organize tasks and these are especially helpful for reporting, accounting and staff management. Channel Managers, on the other hand, specialize in distributing short-term rentals to listing websites, whether it comes to wholesalers, GDS, Metasearch, Vacation Rental sites or OTAs.

Capability

PMS systems are created originally in the form of front desk hotel software, and are made to follow trends in the market and can redirect them to vacation rentals or some other expanding sector. With the use of this type of system, you can spend less time in dealing with business and get more time to concentrate on guest experience and guests.

A PMS channel manager can let you deal with time-consuming operations of managing a vacation rental business. A PMS channel manager updates information automatically across every booking channel and can automate payments and online reservations. Dedicated channel managers, however, are online distribution specialists and can frequently offer much more connections across many channels.

Sophistication

When you choose a property management system integrated with a channel manager, it can help you in online property management and can ensure listing distribution for you across many websites. A PMS or company has several advantages. Property management systems offer automated guest communication services, business performance analytics, in-built accounting services and many more.

PMS coming with an in-built channel manager can be very useful for your own business. A dedicated channel manager is useful in all those cases where there is a drop in the functionality of a property management system. There are more sophisticated capabilities of dedicated channel managers, which can let you create a very complex type of pricing model as per your wish. While PMSes and channel managers tend to vary in nature, the former lacks the sophisticated features that are part of dedicated channel managers – such as pushing right property specs and dealing with a complicated pricing model.

Support

A few property management firms have a team comprising of local employees that care for on-site upkeep and maintenance. But you can expect a built-in expert team with dedicated channel managers, which come with the support of a team comprising of expert distribution professionals. The team of experts of the developer company has a direct communication line with booking websites as well as other channels, due to the fact that a high volume of properties is offered by dedicated channel managers to listing websites.

 

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5 Questions to Ask About Channel Management for Hotels

A Hotel Channel Management Software can be assistive for you, whether you are in search of revenue management or hotel distribution. The primary functionality of this type of application is to make sure that every hotel sales channel keeps abreast of restrictions, rate modifications and any changes that take effect. These types of systems make sure that OTAs can remain in touch with a hotel. Thus, only actual information about hotels is passed on to possible guests. There are many types of hotel channel managers, and all of them are quite useful to use. Here are 5 questions that you have to ask about channel management software systems for hotels.

5 Questions to Ask About Channel Management for Hotels

What kind of support will it come with?

When there is a breakdown, powerful distribution systems have fast support infrastructure and related troubleshooting protocols. This type of support that is offered tends to differ across systems. Although some of these come with an automated backup that can ensure booting as soon as there is a failure of the main system, others come with customer care centers that operate 24X7.

What are the access rights?

Better access rights for this type of software is the tool for proper marketing of products. At times, sound strategies for revenue management are able to protect as well as get data together. These can pave the way for different access rights across various kinds of user levels. Typically, multi-level access rights are offered through 4 main roles:

  • Front Desk
  • Reservations Manager
  • Property Owner
  • System Admin

Every one of these has rights and limitations of its own.

Is it easy to use?

You have to ensure that the system is easy to use. A few channel management systems are also available with a full user acceptance test, which is followed by strict testing for the team of the hotel. This makes sure that the product can be used smoothly. It is important that you consider that the tool can be implemented and adopted with ease.

Can automatically sync inventories?

You have to check whether your chosen channel management software automatically inform the user and update the availability to all connected channels for any modification or cancellation happened on any channel. Lots of software programs can manage more than one channel, although that does not mean that they can sync inventories based on reservation modification, which is possible only when the channel manager has 2-way XML connectivity with channels for seamless data transfer. Thus, it is important that you check this thing beforehand. It is also essential that you check whether the channel manager is available connectivity with the right PMS and Channels.

Does it ensure data security?

Finally, you should also choose a hotel channel manager that gives you data security. Data security has become the biggest challenge for the hospitality industry. For hotels, protecting guest data like address and credit card details has become crucial in post-GDPR age. While finding out the right vendor for your distribution management, do check whether the provider is PCI and GDPR compliant.

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Maldives Travel Trends

Regarded as the epitome of luxury tourism in South Asia, Maldives, with its over 1000 coral islands has emerged as a ‘premier’ brand. Tourism remains the largest economic industry in the country.

To keep up with the tourism demand, which is expected to cross 1.5 million in 2019, the Government has been undergoing renovation of its key airport and actively encouraging new luxury resorts. International brands like Waldorf Astoria, Pullman, Westin and Hard Rock Café have recently opened in the archipelago.

With over 135 resorts and 10 major hotels along with numerous guest houses, the occupancy rate in the country however has remained stagnant for the last few years. While China, Germany, the UK, Italy and India has consistently been the top five source market, in recent times Maldives has seen a surge in tourist arrivals from South Korea.

A long stay destination, where average length of stay is over 6 days, hotels for years have depended on tour operators and travel agents for bookings. However, with the increase in supply of rooms and change in guest booking behavior, hotels have been adapting to online travel.

Global OTAs like Booking.com, Expedia and Agoda  has become quite popular with hotelieres. Booking.com, for instance, has 795 properties listed, Expedia has close to 700 hotels and guest houses in Maldives listed on its channel.

As online distribution evolves, hotels are increasingly adjusting to changes in market dynamics. While GDS remains their most popular channels, they are opening up to OTA and metasearch as well.

Are you connected to right channels and keeping them automatically updated with rates and availability on a regular basis?

Reach out to us for your connectivity needs to make the most of your online revenue- https://goo.gl/3gKUJZ

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Travel Statistics to Know About in 2020

Travel Statistics to Know About in 2020

The online global travel market was over $629 billion in overall worth in 2017 and is anticipated to reach a figure of around $818bn by the year 2020. These are some travel statistics that you must know about for the year 2020.

Longer family holidays are becoming more popular

These days, family holidays spanning for a longer time are up. While it is always that family trips have been a staple part of annual programs, family holidays are being influenced too much by @travelling_family, @byjetpack, @thebucketlistfamily and the likes. By 2020, it is figured that around 50% of the labor force of America and the UK will comprise of freelancers. 40% more kids got home-schooled in the year 2017 instead of in 2014 (comprising of as many as 48,000). It comes as no surprise that the freedom offered by home-schooling is being embraced by parents.

Rise of Online Travel Research

These days, more and more travellers are carrying out research over the World Wide Web to know about the different types of travel options, accommodations etc available. The travel website Tripadvisor is being used increasingly to find out about hotels, restaurants, flights and more. Tripadvisor, with over 325 users every month, is in the position to have an impact on travel purchases online. Travelers who visit this website are also likelier to take time on research, with over 80% taking over 4 weeks to finish a purchase. This is a popular point to start for lots of travel searches, particularly in the preliminary stages of travel research.

Solo Travel is getting friendlier

These days, the introduction of co-living apartments is being given more and more prominence. These let solo travellers come across people on their trips having a similar mindset. WeLive is a leading name in co-living that has apartment complexes these days, with hot tubs, yoga classes, events programs, shared social leaders etc in Crystal City and New York. Travellers can stay in these complexes for a few months or only a few days. Dublin Airport made a claim that 57% out of its estimated 31.5 million passengers in 2018 were solo travellers. In Solo Travel in 2020, younger travellers can be expected more than ever earlier.

Travel decisions will be impacted by Generation Alpha

The term ‘Generation Alpha’ means the generation of people who were born after the year 2010, and is exhibiting more signs of having an impact on family travel planning and decisions than was supposed previously, as per Expedia Group Media Solutions. According to the study of Expedia Group 2019 globally, on an average, travellers from Generation Alpha are making over 3 family vacations in a calendar year.

According to Short Term Rentals 2019, 95% of family trippers mentioned that their priority was to keep their families happy and entertained, while other important priorities were closest theme parks or main attractions (as mentioned by 85%), making travel plans around the time of school holidays (mentioned by 85%), outdoor activities (mentioned by 85%) and value and deals (mentioned by 89%).

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