As the merger of Availpro and Fastbooking, D-EDGE combines complementary expertise: technology, on the one hand, digital marketing on the other, and years of experience in the hotel industry. D-EDGE’s CEO Pierre-Charles Grob (pictured left) considers the company’s closeness with its 12,000 customers around the world its greatest resource. Independent or group, their challenges and needs lay the outlines for the company’s innovations and contributions to building hotel technology and marketing for tomorrow. Grob tells us more about his vision of the distribution landscape and the future of hospitality.
What would be your recommendations to hoteliers to optimise their online distribution?
Hoteliers have many levers they can trigger. Some are quick wins that provide visible results in a very short time, and some are actions that require more time and more investments.
The levers that can be activated in a short time:
• Set up a price disparity in favour of your brand website. This is the nerve of war!
• Replace Static Rates with Dynamic Rates in your contracts with your distributors
• Offer discount coupons for a next stay when checking out – or attach them to the invoice – to encourage your customers to come back and book online on your website
Actions that can be undertaken within three months:
Update and optimise the information available on your website to improve your conversion rate. Make sure they are relevant and address your visitors’ main concerns, so they don’t have to leave your site to get this information: location of your hotel, photos, quick search, price comparison widget.
• Implement an online visibility strategy to generate traffic: Search marketing, Metasearch, pre- and re-targeting. Well managed, these campaigns can generate a quick and very interesting return on investment.
• Manage your customer feedback in order to leverage positive reviews and immediately address the others.
Actions that may take several months but which will have very significant impacts on the hotel’s business:
• Implement a CRM. A real CRM that is interconnected with all your other tools and in particular your PMS and Channel Manager.
• Rethink your website, especially if it had not been developed for mobile.
• Leverage your PMS! Analyse your bookings by channel and segment over the next few months and calculate your rev per net per channel. Then, decide on the distribution mix you want to implement to optimise your revenues and profit margin.
What do you foresee as the main changes in the hotel distribution in the coming months?
The differences between the major players will continue to fade. It will become difficult in my opinion to clearly differentiate the positioning and offer of tourism giants (Expedia, Booking, Airbnb, Ctrip), Pure players (Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Tencent), the 10 largest hotel chains (Accor, BTG Hotels, BW, Choice, Hilton, Huazhu, IHG, JinJang Marriott Wyndham) and independent hotels.
A good example is OYO. They have used the model of large hotel chains, added a technological layer and entered the independent hotel market.
The alliance between Marriott and Expedia and the acquisition of HotelTonight by Airbnb are further illustrations of the new interactions that take place between the various players, each pushing back its borders.
The common thread in all these developments is the central role of technology. And the central role of the end customer: both prescriber and validator of the change.
In our field of hotel technology, entry barriers are already high. Existing companies that will listen best to the market (hotels and travellers) and continue to invest and innovate will be the winners.
This article was sponsored by D-Edge
