How to beat OTAs without the billion dollar budget

If 2021 was the year of recovery for hoteliers, 2022 was the year of opportunity and growth. After facing down enormous challenges, tides have truly turned for the hotel industry with global occupancy now reaching pre-pandemic levels.

But the old issues - like competing with OTAs - remain, alongside new challenges in the form of ever-increasing customer expectations. From personalized digital experiences to seamless booking journeys and more importance than ever placed on finding the best price, hotel guests are becoming more discerning at a time when hoteliers are shorter on staff and time than they've ever been. That's why at Triptease we've continued to work tirelessly to build the products and features that will help hoteliers face these challenges and succeed.

Here’s a roundup of our best product innovation so hoteliers can focus on what they do best: providing great guest experiences.

Triptease now connects to your CRM

Uncertainty surrounding the future of cookies is placing pressure on hoteliers to think more about the collection of first-party data. There’s also the ever-increasing expectation from customers for personalized communication, which means email marketing will remain a critical marketing tool in 2023 and beyond.

Triptease launched Email Capture Messages back in 2019 to make it easier for hoteliers to collect first party data, but this was only the first iteration of what our Email Capture functionality would be. We knew that the process of manually downloading that data and then adding it to the CRM was time consuming for customers, so we’ve now eliminated that step for all hotels using Revinate and Mailchimp CRM.

Wondering why you can only see two providers? Well, keep your eyes peeled in 2023! One of our biggest priorities is expanding CRM integrations and supporting hoteliers in sending rich data to other applications.

Impactful messages that look subtle on desktop and mobile

Seamlessly embed messages anywhere on your website

Website personalization requires hoteliers to find the balance between design and functionality. Pop-up messages are great at grabbing audiences’ attention, but not always quite the right experience for every hotel brand or website. Customers also prefer website experiences that are seamless and sleek, especially on mobile.

The Inline Message type is not a pop-up and instead a message that can be embedded anywhere within the hotel website and booking engine.

Add promo codes that can be copied with one click

If you're not familiar with what this feature can do, your customers can now copy a promo or discount code to their clipboard to use when making a booking, just like they would on any other eCommerce website.

Increase urgency with a countdown timer

One way eCommerce brands drive revenue during peak seasons is by incorporating time-sensitive promotions into their website messaging. At Triptease, we previously enabled hoteliers to do just that - using the Countdown Timer Message to promote limited-time offers to potential guests. We are now pleased to announce this feature is available for the Inline Message.

A new Parity product for a changing booking landscape

The Triptease Parity tool was one of the first products we built to help hoteliers take control of their rate distribution and drive direct bookings. But in recent years the rate parity battleground has changed significantly and the Triptease product needed to change with it. That’s why we’re excited to launch the brand new Triptease Parity tool.

The fully interactive, redesigned dashboard includes more data sources, historical changes over time and new ways to cross reference your data. Perhaps most importantly, hoteliers can now easily switch between looking at pricing on OTA partner sites and pricing on metasearch.

Click here to read about all the new features of this redesigned product.

Automatically provide a discount to customers who’ve seen a lower price on metasearch

Target customers arriving on your website via Triptease Meta

Onsite personalization can increase conversion rates by more than 16% and booking engine personalization can increase your metasearch performance by 118%. That’s why we’ve made it easier than ever to provide targeted, personalized content to customers coming from metasearch.

Meta customers tend to be more price-savvy, as they will probably have seen your direct price alongside OTA prices. With this feature, you can target them specifically with discounts that you aren’t showing to other customers who might not be as switched on in regards to price.

Automatically provide a discount to customers who’ve seen a lower price on metasearch

Customers using both Triptease Meta and Targeted Messages now have access to game-changing new onsite functionality. If a potential customer has seen a lower price than your direct price in their metasearch results, you can now automatically provide them with a promo code when they arrive on your website.

Watch this space in January because we have really exciting news for hoteliers interested in always having the best price on meta.

Track the impact of parity on your metasearch performance with the Metasearch Parity Insights dashboard

We know that guests looking at meta are acutely aware of OTA prices when they book. That means the way your hotel’s direct price appears in comparison to OTA prices is incredibly important.

The new Metasearch Parity Insights dashboard gives you a clear overview of the state of your parity and its impact on your metasearch performance. The dashboard allows you to easily monitor improvements, spot issues, and identify missed revenue opportunities related to metasearch. This is now available to all customers of both Triptease Parity and Metasearch and is located in the Parity Manager.

Helping hoteliers understand their message performance so they can quickly make informed changes to their strategy

When it comes to website personalization, making the right decisions and analyzing the results quickly and easily can be a real challenge. We hope the following updates make life and performance reporting much simpler for Triptease hotels (and we have hours of customer research calls to prove it!).

We are now thrilled to share the updated and vastly improved Message Manager.

What does this mean for hoteliers?

• Get a much clearer view of your current (and historic) Targeted Message performance instantly.
• More easily filter and bulk update/share your messages. We hope this will make life a lot simpler for hoteliers working at larger hotel groups where you’re managing the messages for many hotels simultaneously.
• Understand what kind of performance metrics different message types can drive, whether that’s conversion rate, impressions or revenue per click.
• Create messages even more quickly and in more confident with new features such as automatically find copyright images and preview messages before they go live
• See a summary breakdown of all your properties immediately.

Paid Search: expand your reach across multiple languages

Paid Search is typically the first touchpoint that a customer will have with your hotel. And first impressions matter so it's important to get this right.

Triptease now provides Multilingual Paid Search ads, allowing you to expand your reach and relevancy within the market.

By offering ads to match the different language versions of your website, you can speak to your guests in the right language for them. This will drive increased reach, higher click-through rates, and ultimately more direct bookers.

There has also been a lot of work done behind the scenes with Paid Search. Triptease has consistently delivered market-beating performance in Paid Search, both in terms of booking volume and cost of sale, thanks to continuous campaign optimization. All this could not have been possible by without intelligently leveraging Triptease's hard-to-get data across parity, undercut and availability datapoints that influences effective bidding.

We have exciting plans that will allow us to extend performance further next year, so watch this space!

Your feedback builds the Triptease product

Thanks to all our partner hotels around the world for your feedback, recommendations and product requests in 2022. We hope you’re as thrilled as we are about the direction of Triptease product development - there’s lots more exciting updates to come! As ever, if you have questions or suggestions for the team just send us a message - and maybe next year your product request will become a reality too.

Not working with Triptease yet? Get in touch via the form below to discuss your direct booking goals for 2023, and how Triptease can help you achieve them.