Corporate Sales and Revenue Manager
About our client
This hotel group discovered Triptease when their Corporate Sales and Revenue Manager spotted the Price Check widget and a personalized message on another hotel’s website while booking his own trip. He later looked into the wider Triptease product offering and learnt more about the features, coaching, industry-leading content and community available to Triptease clients. Soon after that, the group decided to join forces with Triptease.
Challenge
While the number of inbound tourists in Bali has increased since early 2018, supply still outstrips demand. Smaller hotel chains and independents have to provide enticing offers online to ensure their rooms are filled.
Maintaining rate parity with OTAs is in Indonesia is also challenging. “We have had a hard time with Agoda and Expedia,” says the hotelier. “It feels like they punish us for disparities on different regional websites. After partnering up with Triptease, we have been able to take our parity reports to our Market Managers and recover our rate parity.“
Personalized guest experiences are at the heart of this hotel group. This is reflected in exceptional customer ratings (4.5 on TripAdvisor and 9.1 on Booking.com). That’s why it’s a big concern for the business when guests get a conflicting experience between OTAs and their direct site, damaging their brand's reputation in the process.
On one occasion, for example, some OTAs offered customers this hotel group's Bedroom Suites with Pool in greater numbers than the hotel could supply. This disrupted the hotel's relationship with its guests and threatened to affect its excellent reviews online.
Solution
The hotel group strives to always provide the best deal on their direct website. Their revenue managers use Triptease's Disparity Dungeon to continuously monitor disparities and raise any issues with their OTA market managers. Triptease's Price Check message reinforces to guests when the group has the best price available online.
The group's Revenue Manager explains that Full Screen Messages created with Triptease play a crucial role in showing off their benefits for direct bookers. To maximize the impact of their messages, the hotel team segments them according to their guests’ demographics. “We find that foreign guests prefer benefits like a free shuttle from the airport, while locals are more likely to book when we offer them a free drink,” shares the hotelier.
The hotel team speaks warmly about their relationship with Triptease’s Direct Booking Coaches. They frequently keep in touch with their appointed Coach in Singapore, discussing hotel-specific challenges and sharing their feedback on the platform’s performance.
Results
Integrating with the Triptease Platform has resulted in an impressive 87% decrease in undercut rate as the team are now able to reduce their disparities easily.
The Full Screen Messages resulted in a 90% revenue uplift when guests showing signs of leaving the website were shown the personalized messages. This earned the properties $29k in revenue from August to January 2019. The hotel chain has already run fifteen different messages, seeing a significant 3% conversion rate on average.
Price Check drove a 5.04% conversion rate on the web page when the hotel was in parity (as opposed to 1.70% when the widget wasn’t activated).
