If you want a larger share of the 1.55 million room nights booked each day on this platform, you need to make the most of how you present and use your listing. We asked Booking.com to share their top tips for STAAH partners to get you ahead of the pack.
BONUS TIP AT THE END OF ARTICLE. DON’T MISS!
1. Productivity Hack: Setup Your Automatic Replies for Their New Guest Chat-Bot
Save time and improve guest experience by using automatic replies for check-in, check-out, parking and bed preference requests. Booking.com surveyed accommodation partners and estimate that basic requests like these cost some hotels up to two hours a week! Save yourself the hassle of manually responding to the same thing over and over again and let their guest chat bot “Booking Assistant do it for you.
Click here to visit Booking.com and set it up.
2. Don’t Forget the Basics: Get Your Property Page Score to 100%
Part of how Booking.com identifies the best options to offer guests is by taking into account the “Property Page Score”. Put your best foot forward, a better page score means more page visits to your listing on Booking.com, more visits means more reservations.
Click here to visit your page score and see what needs to be updated.
3. Be Seen: Leverage Special Offers like “Preferred Partnership”
Almost all the top performing STAAH partners using Booking.com are Preferred Partners and there’s a good reason for it. Preferred status significantly increases views of your Booking.com listing. Preferred partnership is only offered to accommodations that have high review scores, conversion rates, and low cancellations in relation to the local market.
In general, you are already doing pretty well if you get an invite to be a preferred partner with Booking.com. Membership will cost you a little extra commission in some cases but the uplift in reservations can be as high as 35% which is a far better return on investment than discounting rates to try and attract guests.
To find out if you’re eligible to join the Booking.com Preferred program, log on to your extranet and click on the Opportunities tab.
4. Knowledge Is Power: Use Analytics to Plan Better Understand How Guests Find and Book You
Booking.com has an enormous amount of very useful Analytics that can help you make more informed decisions about your strategy. A great place to start is the Booker Insights report, here you can do things like compare length of stays to cancellation rates or average rates to design the perfect promotions strategy for the coming months.
Click here to visit your Booking.com Analytics reports.
BONUS TIP:
- Improved appearance in search results, attracting more visitors to your page.
- Increased revenue as many users end up booking the non-discounted rates for other room/ rate types.
- Improved occupancy if you target the promotions on the right dates and impose minimum length of stay to secure higher value bookings.
- Promotions such as Early Bookers and Last Minute Deals allow properties to manage occupancy based on business needs.
- By leveraging Basic Deals you can target the promotion to fit the time zone of a targeted market. With Basic Deals, the property will appear higher in search results when customers are sorting by price. You can further reinforce this deal by making it a Secret Deal, which gets an extra push by Booking.com.
- Reduce cancellations. A third of all reservations on Booking.com are made via a mobile device. 40% of all smartphone bookings are last-minute bookings that have a low cancellation rate. By leveraging the Last Minute Deals, you can attract these late bookers.
Want more ideas? Booking.com has a website called Check-In with lots of great tips. Or get unique recommendations tailored to your property by visiting your Opportunity Centre.