The hospitality digital landscape is beyond saturated and very much a buyers market. OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) and travel meta search engines are extremely advanced and continuously evolving, making it a challenging environment for hoteliers trying to increase direct, non commissionable, web business. So what can individual properties and chain hotels do to reduce their dependency on OTAs?
The OTA’s are masters of selling, regardless of product quality and hospitality. Hotels can be masters of product quality and hospitality, yet remain somewhat reliant on the sales power of OTA’s. To give some idea of the scale of OTA activity, Goldman Sachs estimates that OTAs generate 8-10% of Google’s gross revenue worldwide with their PPC spend.
There is no reason why hotels can’t be the master of all three tenets of quality, hospitality and sales with an evolving strategy to reduce dependency on OTA’s. Having worked in the online hospitality industry for over 5 years, here’s some of my top level strategies on how to reduce OTA dependency for hoteliers.
Read the original article in full and discover 7 tactics to reduce OTA dependency.
