We’re living in an era of mass data collection, at every stage of the booking process, the user gives away another small piece of the conversion puzzle.
If properly taken advantage of, this data should empower businesses, it can give hoteliers the answers to those burning questions, and insight into their guests booking behavior like never before.
Attracting direct bookings, as opposed to via an OTA or other third party, can be difficult but the reward is a lower cost per acquisition – meaning more profit for your hotel. Sometimes the smallest tweaks to rate plans can make the biggest impact on booking conversion rates however, with a massive deficit of time, and an abundance of data to process, analyzing these numbers often gets put off or forgotten.
When you understand your guests’ online behavior, you’re able to create a book direct strategy with a high conversion rate. Your booking engine is more than a simple funnel for bookings: it gathers tons of data, which you can use to improve your revenue strategy and give your hotel the competitive edge.
At Net Affinity our booking engine technology tackles all of these challenges, driving direct bookings to your hotel. The Business Intelligence Console is an innovative feature within the booking engine that helps hotels take advantage of their data.
The technology provides a 360-degree view of a hotel’s direct booking performance at the push of a button with real-time business-critical data. The Business Intelligence Console generates predictions via easy-to-interpret data representation and displays alerts which will guide the hotelier to review and act, based upon their own expert intuition.
3 ways to use essential booking engine data to implement a successful book direct strategy:
Analyze User Behaviour
Booking engine data should be a central part of your conversion strategy. This data highlights patterns in user behavior, m
aking the hotelier more aware of how best to meet their guest’s expectations, and even delight them with their experience online and in the hotel.
To identify the subtle fluctuations and patterns that form, you’ll need to be able to compare figures from this year, and from previous years too – The Business Intelligence Console continually gathers data to display more profound insights with each transaction.
Timely Business Decisions
To make 
an informed decision to alter a rate plan means paying attention to key metrics and reacting to them. You need to be aware of conversion lead times, key search dates and high search volume above all. You can then adjust your rate plans according to what your data is showing you at the right moments.
Compare Your Hotel To Similar Properties
This doesn’t simply mean looking at your location, but also the property size, and type of segment you’re serving in comparison to hotels around you and how your hotel is performing against them.
Hoteliers should use their booking engine data to decide when price plays a bigger part in converting than value. In some cases, price is king, this is true for many budget hotels, but often hotels will need to offer guests more value for money in terms of packages and giveaways, to differentiate from competitors.
How We Can Help You Access Your Guest Data
The Business Intelligence Console will provide this comparative data, so the hotelier can easily see how they fit into the market, freeing them up to focus on guest experience.
Net Affinity’s Business Intelligence Console is the next step in attaining dynamic, intelligent information to allow you to excel in your direct revenue strategy.
This feature is available to all Net Affinity clients, and is accessible via the booking engine at any time, meaning intelligent business decisions are much easier to make than ever before.
Find out more about the Business Intelligence Console here.
