Technology-Driven Insights Are The Secret To Hotels Winning More Heads On Beds

Corporate travel and events have been a major casualty of the COVID-19 crisis - hitting hotels hard. With business travel down more than 90%, attracting leisure guests has never been more important to safeguarding a hotel's future.

We are seeing a slow recovery in the leisure sector with demand being captured through online channels, direct and indirect bookings as well as through tour operators and bed banks. But, as competition ramps up, not just between hotels and their peers but against vacation rentals and some online travel agencies (OTAs), hotels need to up their game by gaining a deep understanding of where their greatest market opportunities lie and how best to convert sales.

The world has changed. Hotels can no longer rely on their pre-pandemic strategies to win back guests. Consumer demand has changed, competition is fiercer than ever and the tools available to hotels to attract demand have flourished. Hotels - from the largest global majors to smaller chains and independent properties - must use everything they have to gain a competitive edge and secure heads on beds.

Revenue, marketing and demand generation strategies need to adapt to the 'new normal' and be based on in-depth business intelligence that identifies the strongest market opportunities and the best channels to convert bookings.

The latest intelligent data management technology is helping hotels to unlock crucial business insights and dynamically optimize distribution, marketing and revenue performance across direct and indirect channels.

In this new world, the lines between marketing and distribution have blurred. The likes of Google have expanded their services now with a performance based model called Pay Per Stay (PPS) while Expedia and Agoda are offering PPC options. Given this, marketing can longer have sole responsibility for platforms such as Google, but needs to share this with their revenue and distribution teams.

Hotels' focus should be very much on how to use business intelligence and actionable insights to boost performance. BI solutions are enabling hotels to identify demand opportunities and risks and then dynamically choose the best channels (direct and indirect) and optimize their performance - so they can win on price on every one of those channels.

This may be easier for the large chains to achieve, as they enjoy strong customer loyalty programs and have dedicated marketing and distribution teams who can attract the demand, and smaller chains with a minimal budget and in-house expertise may struggle. For them, choosing the right technology partners to help them manage the relationships with Google and their OTA partners can make all the difference.

In the online world, pricing but mostly positioning and visibility are key. You can have the best rates and the best reviews but, if no one sees them then you will lose out to your competitor. Helping hotels to optimize their distribution, revenue and marketing using this holistic approach have been Fornova's core focus during the pandemic - making sure that hotels are getting the most heads on beds for their marketing and distribution budget, whether it is CPA or PPC.

Our entire suite of tools, all based on extensive business intelligence, is here to help hotels achieve exactly that - to use the right channel, at the right time, to the right audience. We combine leading-edge technology with extensive hospitality expertise to deliver high-powered solutions to the world's largest hotel brands and OTAs as well as hundreds of independent hotels around the globe.

The FornovaHBI (Hotel Business Intelligence) suite includes the following solutions:

FornovaCI (Competitive Intelligence): Increase your market share by having a better understanding of how your property or chain performs against the comp set. Maintain competitive market visibility, by making sure your hotels get better ranking and share of voice than their competition across the different OTAs.

FornovaDI (Distribution Intelligence): Monitor and manage digital distribution across all contracted and uncontracted OTA and metasearch sites - making sure hotel distribution is aligned with direct and indirect strategies and forecast.

FornovaEC (E-Commerce Optimizer): Optimize marketing spend on direct programmatic channels for better digital marketing ROI. Combine the power of Google's new PPS performance based offering and FornovaDI.

FornovaRI (Revenue Intelligence): Revenue and operational analytics in a unified dashboard. Analyze customer and channel segmentation and take immediate actions to reduce occupancy risks.

For further information visit https://www.fornova.com/.