Following a recent E Symposium we were asked to summarise some useful hints and tips that participants could take away with them. This is what we put together on the subject of Channel Management, and how a hotel can improve its online sales. Appoint a Revenue Manager As more of a hotels business moves online, the function of a Revenue Manager has a large influence on a hotels profitably, it should be undertaken by an experienced or at least willing employee. Revenue Manager has goals It...

Regular readers of our bulletins may have noticed that in the past we have tended to be slightly sceptical about hotels using social media. However, in the interests of remaining open-minded we did our best to introduce hotels on our Hotel Support program to FaceBook and Twitter, and we ourselves have been amazed at the results, particularly the way Marketing Managers and Revenue Managers have taken to FaceBook. This led us to ask the question; WHY is Social Media working for hotels, when so man...

Our Recently introduced Demand Manager Tool seems to have captured Revenue Managers interest. Although a simple graph it can, in the right hands, be a very useful feature. The graph simply looks at demand (the quantity of searches made by web visitors for a particular day) against the average price of the rooms on that day. The underlying theorey is 'Supply and Demand', which might sound new and novel but in fact the vast majority of hotels have been practising Demand Management since hote...

We often see occasions when hotels can sell more online, without any expensive technology, or dancing round the maypole at midnight, but the simple application of a little 'love'. One of our customers really needed to grow their online sales, and in March, after years of leaving the management of their different Online Travel Agents to 3rd parties, decided to have a good look at just one of these channels, namely Booking.com. This channel had delivered just a couple of a hundred euros in April...

This is a very simple overview on the various Google tools that can help or influence a hotel website. With so many hotel bookings passing through the internet, your average Hotel Revenue Manager will need a Google Account and will need to know how to use the different tools. Note - Anyone on the Hotel Support Program will be covering these one by one, starting with Google Maps in the next Support Module. A. Google Maps B. Google Local Business Center C. Google Analytics D. Google WebMaster ...

During the Hotel Support Modules we effectively train participants (Revenue Managers) to use a wide range of tools to generate room sales. In the last module we asked the participants to look at the sample hotel occupancy forecast below, define the problem and brainstorm what they can do about it. The problem is of course that the hotel is empty for some reason on May 10 to the 13th. Below is the list of ideas that was generated to improve room sales in this particular period. Reduce...

As a Technical Company it has to be said that we AccuBook often stood in awe of the online trail blazed by the airlines at the turn of the century. However in presentations whenever we mentioned the Ryanairs of the world we were quickly shot down with a '...We are hotels, not airlines...'. However by now even the most hardened online sceptic would have to admit that nearly every online techniqiue used by the airlines eventually becomes standard practise for the hotels. This being the case, t...

The word 'Staycation' has been around for years, but started to become more common terminology at the start of the recession in 2008 based on the idea of 'Stay At Home Vacations'. But do the facts really show that more people are holidaying at home? The graph above shows revenue earned for a selection of AccuBook hotels during 2009. In the current economic climate we were expecting to see flat or weak demand, and this was indeed the case, until the months of July and August when demand was up ...

A few conversations with our hotel customers over the last couple of weeks has convinced us that is worth republishing our Online Marketing New Years Resolutions once again, only slightly modified from 2009. This is presented from the point of view of a Revenue Manager, but could be just as easily used by a Hotel Owner/Manager. ............................... As a Revenue Manager i will set the following targets and have them signed off by the Hotel Owner/Manager by the end of January. Target...

The news is not good in the European Hotel Industry, and is not set to improve soon with forecasts of 1 in 5 hotels going out of business over the next 12 months. AccuBook wants to make sure that everything possible has been done for their customers and associates. Hotel OWNERS and MANAGERS have been invited to a short presentation-cum-discussion where we will outline what can be done to sell more rooms online. We dont believe we can turn around the economic recession but there IS room for imp...