First a bit of historical perspective:
So a long time ago,(5 years) our 9 room place managed to reach the top of TA, with over 5000 hotels on there. Business was good and we were typically nearly always up to capacity with a small dip in the winter months. Then many new places began popping up. Nothing truly competing in the same space, but suddenly there were 6000 hotels for our city on TA and that combined with the odd crappy review from a bitter guest put us further down the pile. I finally gave in and hooked up ResKey with myAllocator and jumped in with agoda and booking.com
so this situation has remained the same for several years now. But I still feel that OTAs don't truly show our space the way guests need to see it, both for the purpose of the right person finding the perfect place for them and also for just generally not showing the right details through. I'd love to just cut down the OTAs share of our sales but I'm not sure where to begin. I'm fairly certain that if I removed them completely I'd see a small drop in sales, but people might start using that TA business link more again. However I'm also worried that people making TA searches just won't find us listed if we have no partnered OTAs. I could keep just the tripconnect up, and compete exclusively against myself there.
So many questions. The other side of this is the optimization to capture more market directly from our website. I've spent some time last month adding in SSL and trying to just clean things up, but there are probably a few bags of tricks for either directly fixing things or secondary measures like SEO.
Id love to get all your input!
thanks-
j
So a long time ago,(5 years) our 9 room place managed to reach the top of TA, with over 5000 hotels on there. Business was good and we were typically nearly always up to capacity with a small dip in the winter months. Then many new places began popping up. Nothing truly competing in the same space, but suddenly there were 6000 hotels for our city on TA and that combined with the odd crappy review from a bitter guest put us further down the pile. I finally gave in and hooked up ResKey with myAllocator and jumped in with agoda and booking.com
so this situation has remained the same for several years now. But I still feel that OTAs don't truly show our space the way guests need to see it, both for the purpose of the right person finding the perfect place for them and also for just generally not showing the right details through. I'd love to just cut down the OTAs share of our sales but I'm not sure where to begin. I'm fairly certain that if I removed them completely I'd see a small drop in sales, but people might start using that TA business link more again. However I'm also worried that people making TA searches just won't find us listed if we have no partnered OTAs. I could keep just the tripconnect up, and compete exclusively against myself there.
So many questions. The other side of this is the optimization to capture more market directly from our website. I've spent some time last month adding in SSL and trying to just clean things up, but there are probably a few bags of tricks for either directly fixing things or secondary measures like SEO.
Id love to get all your input!
thanks-
j