Our friends over at Duetto Research have penned this great article about how despite the best paid plans of the world’s hotels and hotel groups, the trend of OTA bookings is non stop. The article highlights a few key and clear points, all back up by industry research, information and opinion:

  1. Online digital travel sales are expected to top $800 billion by 2020
  2.  OTA bookings now account for 25% of all hotel bookings, and direct-to-property sales are down to 55% of all bookings
  3. Priceline Group says 20% of its gross bookings come from business travel, taking bookings away from traditional corporate booking systems and providers
  4. Hotel commoditization is apparent, and brands are becoming indistinguishable from one another. Is there a better way to stand out from the crowd?
  5. Revenue increases forecast for 2017 are not promising – 4% increase in prices in the US, Asia-Pac moving to negative territory down 0.6% and Western Europe increasing by only 1.8%

There are of course many revenue management strategies which can be utilised to combat both the growth of OTA bookings, and also to try to smash out of the regional averages. There will be winners and there will be losers.
Those properties which have a clear pricing strategy, either using tools such as Duetto, IDeaS, BookingSuite or LodgIQ – or by simply knowing their business operations, spending patterns and habits, which they can easily glean from a hotel software solution from GuestCentrix, have the best chance at making 2017 a record year. Reduce acquisition costs – increase RevPar and ADR – boost the bottom line.