It has been a great fiscal year overall for the hotel industry and perhaps this has distracted us from properly addressing one of our greatest challenges. I am, of course, talking about the problem of home sharing, alternate lodging providers or, more accurately, internet-based service firms (IBSFs) cannibalizing our occupancy rates.

I see this more and more each week amongst the younger generations of customers who are just beginning to accrue enough spending power to have agency over what travel accommodations they select. And overwhelmingly they now opt for IBSFs – foremost among them being Airbnb – instead of traditional hotels. My fear with this preference shift is that soon our properties won’t even be considered at all, let alone second place.

While fighting back through legislation is gaining ground, the glass-half-full approach here is to view home sharing entrants as yet another reason to improve your own business. And for this, you can realize big gains in terms of attracting customers back from these alternate lodging providers by focusing solely on your booking engine.

Why Booking Engines Matter
In a word: revenue! If occupancy is low, it doesn’t matter how great you service your guests or how beautifully appointed your guestrooms are. Putting heads in beds will always be a top priority, and your website is the one channel that is wholly within your control (unlike the OTAs) to showcase the many facets that make your property exceptional.

While drawing people to your brand.com is more the job of marketing and public relations, your booking engine – or more accurately your guest-facing reservation interface – is what’s going to get them to fork over their cash. If there’s one lesson you can learn from the proliferation of home sharing, it’s that shopping for accommodations is no longer purely transactional. Guests want an experience; they want a platform that’s imbued with a ‘sense of discovery’ where they can fully explore a flexible product range and have fun making the final decision.

Moreover, unlike the website front-end which should act as the tasty lure by displaying all that your property has to offer, your booking software – interface, underlying engine and any integrations – can give you precise data on customer behavior so that you can tweak and tinker to find what truly excites.

Do you prompt future guests about room packages right as they are completing their initial queries or is it better to wait until after they have picked a specific room type? How do you infuse more rich media into the booking platform, without overwhelming viewers, so they have greater product transparency to more confidently reserve what they want? These are the sorts of granular questions you can start to ask once you have the data. Further, there’s an aspect of personalization here as past guest data can be utilized to reengineer displays and offers to suit a customer’s preferences.

And indeed, numerous tech vendors can help you do just that, either by providing you with dynamic software that bolts on to your PMS or by helping automate your marketing silos to improve funneling into your booking engine. Some names that come to mind include b4checkin, Cendyn, Revinate, SHR, SiteMinder, TravelClick and a myriad of other vendors, with some offering connected PMS solutions as well. Your first action should be to ask your existing suppliers to see how they can help you maximize the tools your currently use.

Packaging Is Your Best Friend
While most of your guestrooms won’t be able to compete with home sharing in terms of providing apartments with full kitchens embedded in neighborhoods not zoned for short-term rentals, a core advantage for hotels is that we have staff. Yes, we have people who excel at service delivery and ensuring that guests’ needs are handled for them.

So, while your lower tier double queen may look somewhat boring when compared against a newly remodeled loft on Airbnb Plus, where you can fight back is through offering guests fantastic deals for add-on services, amenities or activities to make their time with you exceptional. Free breakfast is perhaps the simplest of these, but you can expand this out to include a full gourmet getaway, spa vouchers, in-room arrival gifts, VIP access or offsite experiences through third parties.

The key here is often that your user interface is cluttered and cumbersome, so your add-ons can’t be fully appreciated nor is the true value being conveyed. To this latter point, for guests to properly window shop and be enticed by your bundles, they need to be shown how much they are saving.

Again, modern booking software can come to the rescue by resuscitating the look and feel of your reservation portal so that users don’t get a headache squinting to read all the details and so they can actually have some fun browsing through all the options you’ve built into the system. An important caveat here is that in order for you to amp up your booking engine with lots of packages and extras, you have to first create those extras – a task that’s far more encompassing than just revenue management.

Select And Upgrade
Where I foresee booking engines making big gains in the coming year is both in their ability to effectively convince customers into upgrading their initial purchases so you can better fill your premium tier product as well as in facilitating individual room selections (for an incremental fee if you so desire) under the guise of an attribute-based sales (ABS) model.

Coupled with your excellent service, your suites and villas will undoubtedly give guests a far better experience over some alternate lodging. But what’s lacking is an effective means by which to tell your inventory’s story via ABS. Sometimes for this we’re just as guilty as the OTAs by displaying our cheapest rooms at the top of the search results page, subconsciously priming customers to select exactly those and not consider much else.

To remedy this, you might try reorienting how product tiers are organized during an inquiry or look for alternate ways to get guests interested in your suites. To better understand what simple initiatives you can take, look no further than companies like Nor1 which has a myriad of solutions designed to, for instance, give you better guest intelligence or increase merchandising sales at check-in.

Another great way to go about this is by letting guests book a standard room, and then sending them an invitation to virtually tour your suites via a confirmation email, either immediately after booking or in the days afterwards. Even though this is a staple of the airline industry, it is still an emergent niche for hotels, with companies like Koridor able to manage these follow-up correspondences via private portals that let guests view then select individual rooms or upgrade to something fancier.

To circumvent any PMS integration issues, you might also recruit your email marketing providers to send out these prearrival messages to inform guests about the wealth of other possibilities that go above and beyond your cheapest room. These can always be connected to private landing pages on your website or direct guests to call a hotline to let your reservations team do the upselling.

Conclusion
I’m always amazed at how great a hotel’s brand.com can look on the front end, but then how abysmal the reservation platform works once you click ‘book now’. By making this a more seamless and painless experience, you will help stem the tide of travelers who will inevitably revert to OTAs or IBSFs that have these familiar and intuitive systems.

Your booking engine is not just your stopgap for growing direct revenues; it can also be utilized for better data collection and guest personalization. Those hotels that adopt software capable of performing these tasks will ultimately be better able to navigate occupancy issues or any other future hardships as well as ensure that top tier products and ancillary service usages are maximized.

(Article originally appeared in the Summer 2019 print issue of Hospitality Upgrade)