Deutsche Hospitality (formerly Steigenberger) run nearly 100 hotels across Europe and Northern Africa, divided into the Steigenberger, Intercity and Jaz in the City brands. One of their key marketing ambitions is to boost direct bookings so they are no longer reliant on OTAs (Online Travel Agents). They’re approaching this by building stronger relationships and better managing parity.
Direct bookings help hotels to gather more data on their guests. This means they can offer services of value and better personalise guests’ experiences. Demonstrating price transparency also reassures guests in their booking, strengthening the direct route and building a trust relationship.
Triptease’s Price Check widget displays best rate information, comparing to the same room across the web to reassure guests. An A/B test was run across the entire portfolio of Steigenberger hotels, and compared pageviews with and without Price Check. The result? A 61% increase in direct bookings.
With 89 hotels and two brands displayed on a number of 3rd party sites, monitoring parity can be challenging, but a best rate guarantee is powerful only if it is accurate. In order to ensure that their direct price is indeed the best, Steigenberger have made excellent use of the Triptease Disparity Dungeon.
Using this real-time list of every instance when a direct price was undercut, Steigenberger have been able to tackle and resolve disparities, recognise and address patterned misrepresentation of prices on 3rd party sites and gain full oversight and control of their pricing.
“Triptease also have a great back end tool which has proved really useful for monitoring parity with the OTAs.
There are a lot of visual graphs within the tool to show you the trends over time, plus we can export all this data to analyse further and identify key patterns. We see our parity issues in a really clear way, issue by issue.
It’s really solution driven."
Ralf Denke
VP E Business Steigenberger Hotels