Hotels invest significant marketing resources to acquire direct bookings. And rightfully so, keeping travelers booking on your own site saves on commission fees that would otherwise go to intermediaries. Even so, with the obligatory need for hotels to offer ready access to travel reviews, many hotels populate their sites with third party data and links that are sending customers — and revenue — away from the hotel and directly to intermediaries.
TrustYou has devised a small change with big revenue impact. Hotels can add TrustYou’s verified review summaries and data from TrustYou surveys to their own site to strengthen the direct booking channel. Verified review summaries do the work of distilling the review into bite-size, high-level summaries of what travelers say about a property. Proactively posting review summaries means travelers can make confident booking decisions directly on the brand.com site.
For many hotels, particularly large brands, the revenue impact of removing unnecessary outlinks and posting TrustYou’s reviews can be considerable. For instance:
A hotel chain with 1,000 properties charges $100 per night per room. This brand typically pays 18% in commission fees to intermediaries. Let’s say this chain opts to strengthen their direct booking channel and integrates verified reviews that consumers trust, resulting in just one additional booking per hotel on its own website per day. This change equates to $6.57 million annually. Here’s how:
- 1 booking/day x 365 days/year = 365 additional bookings on brand.com per year
- 365 bookings x $100 a night = $36500
- $36500 x 18% savings on commission fees = $6570
- $6570 x 1000 hotels = $6.57 million
Calculate Missed Revenue
To better understand the financial impact this change could have on your hotel or brand, use our revenue calculator. Enter in your hotel’s ADR, the average commission it would pay to intermediaries and the number of properties in your portfolio. What you’ll get is the additional revenue your brand could earn annually based on just one additional booking per day on your own website.
The Potential
If you consider what one hotel can do with an additional $10K that might improve your guest experience (guest service bonuses, facilities improvements, a dedicated person to respond to reviews, and so on and so forth) the impact can be huge. What you get is more than $10K, you get trickle-down revenue from improved guest reviews that are then posted on your own site, and you receive even more direct bookings. it’s a positive cycle that’s more than worth it.