User Reviews

Loading...

En provenance du cours de ESSEC Business School

The fundamentals of hotel distribution

511 notes

Explore Related Videos

At Coursera, you will find the best lectures in the world. Here are some of our personalized recommendations for you

ESSEC Business School

The fundamentals of hotel distribution

511 notes

Cours 1 sur 4 dans Specialization Hotel Management: Distribution, Revenue and Demand Management

In today’s hotel sector an increasingly complex network of traditional and web based channels have to be managed to insure hotel success. Key questions include: how should you distribute over the web? What should you include on your brand.com website so people book through it? How can you maximise the potential of online travel agents (OTAs)? With the distribution environment both highly complex and constantly evolving, this course will give you comprehensive foundation of current industry practices to help jump start your career in this fascinating domain. Acknowledgements: Claire Bertrand, Vincent Chatain, Jessica Moses, Benjamin Six (ESSEC Business School), Emilie Dupré (Image-In), Gregory Halidy (Triplay)

À partir de la leçon

How to manage your OTA

In this final module you will attack the critical issue of how to work better with Online Travel Agents. Learning best practices from OTA managers themselves, you will make sure that you are exploiting these valuable and fast growing points of sale to their maximum potential.

Introduction1:11

User Reviews5:44

Competitive Rates2:04

Manage Availability2:49

How should a hotel work with Expedia?25:34

How should a hotel work with Booking.com?11:12

Rencontrer les enseignants

Peter O'Connor
Professor of information systems, Director of the MBA in Hospitality Management
Information systems
Nicolas Graf
Professeur
Management

[MUSIC]

As consumers moved away from using professional advisors towards organizing

travel for themselves, understanding whether a product was the right match for

their particular needs became increasingly difficult.

Without the benefit of a travel agent's knowledge and experience,

how could the consumer be sure that the hotel that they were looking at

was of good quality, safe, and would be a good match for their expectations?

It's one thing to look at the textual descriptions and photographic content

shown on the website, but could they trust that the reality would match that promise?

This need for unbiased, reliable information about quality,

was one of the drivers behind the development of user review sites.

The most famous of which within travel, is probably tripadvisor.com.

On such sites, travelers can leave textual reviews,

post candid photos of their experience in hotels and other travel businesses.

As well as quantitatively rate the business

on a large number of different factors.

These ratings and reviews are then consulted by other travelers considering

staying in that particular property.

In order to get an honest, warts and

all assessment of what it is really like once the sales hype has been removed.

As independent travel has grown, review sites have blossomed

playing a critical role in the travel shopping process.

As they are so powerful in terms of conversion, the majority of the OTA's

build some form or other of user reviews into their online shopping experience.

Some make use of TripAdvisor, we mentioned earlier, integrating its ranking and

review scores into their search result listings.

And the reviews themselves into the individual hotel property pages.

Since consumers perceive these scores to be unbiased,

they can be highly influential in determining whether the hotel

actually closes its sale, and thus, they need to be actively managed.

Other OTAs, most notable booking.com and Expedia maintain their own

user review systems with the added advantage that only real people who

have actually booked through the system in question can actually post a review.

In direct contrast to independent systems such as TripAdvisor,

where anyone can post reviews.

A feature that some claim leaves the latter open to manipulation by

unscrupulous hoteliers, trying to boost their own scores,

a rubbish the competition.

OTAs on the other hand, collect their reviews by soliciting feedback from

actual customers, once they've checked out of the property.

Thus, ensuring that the guest has actually stayed in the property in question.

And that the feedback is based on real experiences.

Perhaps this helps explain why travel reviews on OTA websites have overtaken

generic travel review websites as the most influential feature in travel planning.

According to a recent study by Phocuswright.

Because of this,

OTAs are increasingly stressing user reviews in their search results listings.

Giving prominence to both the review score and the quantity of reviews,

allowing users to sort by popularity with past customers.

Hotels can capitalize on this by insuring that satisfied customers leave reviews,

by, for example, requesting them to do so during the check-out process.

Thus, increasing review volume from satisfied customers.

Unfortunately, manipulating the review score is difficult, and

hotels need to take a long term approach to maximizing this very important metric.

First of all, they should ensure that the product and service provided

matches customer expectations to avoid disappointment and frustration.

Furthermore, they should try to deal with any customer service issues before

the customer checks out, in order to ensure that departing guests are happy and

thus, likely to leave positive feedback.

Reviews can also be used as a source of intelligence about what's working and

what's not working within the hotel property.

If the same issues come up again and again and again,

then priority should be given to finding solutions to these problems,

which will ultimately result in happier customers.

And thus, better review scores in the long term.

Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes.

And ensuring that you consistently have positive review scores is a lot of work.

But the benefits can be staggering.

A recent study carried out by reputation management system,

TrustYou, found that given equal prices, travelers are nearly four

times more likely to choose a hotel with higher review scores.

Even when prices are different, travelers are more likely to book

the hotel with the higher score despite the higher room rates.

And when asked, over three-quarters of travelers were willing to pay more for

a hotel with higher review scores.

In other words, your review score is definitely one of the key factors that

will determine whether you get booked or not.

And thus, is something that warrants

your attention if you wanna get your fair

share of business through OTA channels.

Explorer notre catalogue

Rejoignez-nous gratuitement et obtenez des recommendations, des mises à jour et des offres personnalisées.

Coursera propose un accès universel à la meilleure formation au monde, en partenariat avec des universités et des organisations du plus haut niveau, pour proposer des cours en ligne.

© 2019 Coursera Inc. Tous droits réservés.

Télécharger dans l'App Store

Disponible sur Google Play