While running a hotel business it becomes very important that you make sure your hotel is in healthy condition. In order to find out how your business is doing, you need to see if you have a good occupancy rate. The occupancy rate varies for different hotels depending on the area they are in. For example, for hotels in tourist places- they have high occupancy during vacation time, while hotels in other cities may have a different scenario. Where ever your hotel is, you have to make sure that you always channelize your efforts towards bringing in more traffic and maintain a balance in occupancy between weekends and weekdays. Let us find out the best practices a hotelier can do to increase hotel occupancy.
Understand and Target the Right Market
The best way of moving forward here would be to take a step back and do some research first. You could try to figure out ways in which you can attract more guests during weekdays as well. You could tie up with even planners so they could bring in more events like birthday parties, engagements, weddings, award functions, farewell parties, ladies kitty parties, etc.
Do Marketing for Yourself
Marketing in any business plays a very crucial role. Try to build yourself as a brand. Have a mobile-friendly website in place, post good informative content, organize and promote events.
Go Social:- Try to be present on social media. Make your own page, run travel forum on Facebook & Instagram. Since you are in the local area, post more local activities or things to do posts like-flea markets, night markets, local events, local drinks, and foods must-tries. Such activities attract millennials a lot and can get you higher occupancy in your hotel.
Manage your Online Reputation
Try to get as many good reviews as possible. This will bring in more potential buyers to your property and improve your hotel reputation. Try to place feedback questionnaires everywhere possible: on the front desk, rooms, on social media, on your website, etc. You can integrate this with your PMS Software and streamline this process to the best of your interest.
Strategize Pricing Decisions
Try to have an automated system in place that can help you design your hotel tariff and restaurant menu prices and help you come up with a dynamic pricing strategy. Simple integration with PMS Software can help you decide the correct prices and discounts. You can provide discounts and offers when occupancy looks a little low and lower discount when the occupancy is higher.
Manage your OTAs Channel
There is no way you can ignore the benefits of having OTAs and meta-search engines, especially when you are planning to increase your hotel occupancy rate and maximize your bookings. You must try to find out popular OTAs especially in your country that can help you increase your online reach. So, here it is important that you have a cloud-based Hotel PMS in place. Your PMS software with its channel manager will help you to update tariffs and inventory across all the connected channel partners in real-time. Also, your Meta-search engine will help travelers to compare your hotel’s tariff listed on various OTA channels. A meta-search list on your website will invite travellers to book rooms from your website.
Pay more attention to Guests
Having more and more guests in the hotel will only increase occupancy and that’s what we eventually want. So the guests should be more than just taken care of. Your guests should be well informed, well served, and well heard. Well informed means they should be provided with all the information about your services on your website and your social media pages. Well served means they should be given world-class treatment for them to remember you and spread good word of mouth. Well heard means you must get their feedbacks through a questionnaire and must revert to them as soon as possible. You can integrate this system with hotel management software so that it tracks your guest’s behavior pattern to provide you with better insights for better services in the future. This will increase their trust in you and your brand.
Get More Direct Bookings
In order to increase your hotel occupancy, you must build your mobile-friendly website so that your guests can easily book from your website directly without going anywhere else to find you. Integrate your website with good billing software that can manage your money coming through your bookings.
Partnership with corporates:- Try to tie up with corporates to conduct their seminars, trade shows, meets, award functions, etc. in your hotel. This will keep your hotel occupied even on weekdays. For weekdays they can make their visiting clients and team members stay in your hotel. This usually turns out to be a good strategy for hoteliers.