Increase your hotel’s ranking on Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, and further OTAs.
In today’s competitive digital marketplace, maintaining a strong presence on Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) is crucial for hotels. It’s an increasingly recognized fact that OTAs prioritize hotels likely to sell and generate revenue, which makes having a high click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate vital for maintaining a strong OTA ranking. This article explains how to leverage GuestRadar insights to boost CTR, clicks, and ultimately, conversions on OTAs.
The Benefits of Greater Exposure on OTAs
Increased exposure on OTAs not only leads to more bookings but also fosters enhanced brand awareness. This awareness often trickles down to other channels, such as website booking engines, travel agents, or direct booking inquiries, creating a positive ripple effect.
Achieving High CTR with Relevant Content
To achieve high CTR, a hotel needs to stand out amidst an ocean of OTA listings. The key to capturing the attention of travel planners lies in presenting your hotel as the best option for customers. To this end, providing relevant content is critical.
Research indicates that pictures have the most significant impact on CTR for OTA listings. Thus, hotels must feature photos that clearly communicate relevant aspects of their offerings. If the majority of your guests are honeymooners, for example, featuring photos of romantic settings, sensual bedroom lighting, bathrooms, and couple massages will garner more attention than photos of children’s play areas or food.
Similarly, for business hotels or family resorts, highlighting amenities catering to your target audience is crucial. However, recent data suggests that over 70% of hotel pictures on OTAs are irrelevant to holiday trip planners. Moreover, many travelers find photos to be misleading or misrepresentative of the actual hotel, triggering skepticism. Therefore, while it’s important to make your photos enticing, it’s equally important to ensure they accurately represent your hotel.
Boosting OTA Rankings with GuestRadar
Here’s where GuestRadar, an intuitive hotel market intelligence tool, can make a difference. With GuestRadar, you can determine what your target audience is looking for when searching for hotels for their next vacation. Simply open the GuestRadar dashboard, click on the preferred OTA segment, and you’ll instantly see a demographic, travel intent, and travel length breakdown for that segment. This information includes the average age of your target market, the countries they hail from, their average daily rate (ADR), and budget for their next vacation, and when they plan to visit your destination.
For more granular insights, use the ADR and budget slider controls on the top navigation to filter down to budget thresholds relevant to your hotel. It’s essential to note that guests in different price segments have unique characteristics and preferences when planning their hotel stay, making it important to cater to their specific priorities.
Conclusion
Regularly performing this simple exercise can significantly improve your OTA presence, leading to higher CTR, more clicks, more profile views, and ultimately, more bookings. As a result, your OTA ranking and overall production will increase immensely. So, with a tool like GuestRadar at your disposal, you can effectively harness the power of data to elevate your hotel’s OTA presence and reap the benefits of increased bookings and brand awareness.