All 3 of these are simply part of the everyday process of running a hotel. On their own, they aren’t disastrous, but they can be frustrating and over time can damage the reputation of your hotel by inconveniencing customers and also impact your bottom line.
All 3 of these are simply part of the everyday process of running a hotel. On their own, they aren’t disastrous, but they can be frustrating and over time can damage the reputation of your hotel by inconveniencing customers and also impact your bottom line.
In this article, we’ll explain what each of these challenges is, how they impact hotels, and how you can mitigate and solve these issues with the right channel manager.
3 big challenges for hotels
Rate discrepancy
Hotels typically list their rooms on a wide range of different channels, including OTA platforms like Booking.com and Expedia.com. The prices shown when customers use these sites are often the same as the rates on your hotel website, but not always. When rates differ on your website and third-party platforms, we call this a rate discrepancy.
This is a fairly regular occurrence, and it’s always frustrating for hoteliers. It means you lose out on direct bookings — the most lucrative way to gain customers — and it also encourages customers to book through third-party sites in the future.
There are many reasons why rate discrepancies happen. For example, if your channel manager fails to notify an OTA that a promotion has ended, the OTA will continue to sell your rooms at discounted rates. Another potential reason is if your website uses a different currency conversion rate to your OTA.
Overbooking
Overbooking is when guests book more rooms in your hotel than you have available. Renting out more rooms than you have is actually a fairly common practice in hospitality, as it insures you against last-minute cancellations. Hotels assume a certain percentage of their reservations will cancel, so they increase the number of available rooms to compensate for this.
Unfortunately, overbooking occasionally causes problems when fewer guests cancel and the number of guests arriving exceeds the number of available rooms. In this event, you need to inform your guests that the room they booked is not actually available and help them find other accommodation. This can seriously damage their experience, causing reputational harm to your hotel and leading to negative reviews and bad press.
Room discrepancy
Often, a room will show up as occupied at your front desk, but when housekeeping goes to clean it, it turns out to be clearly empty. In other cases, a room will be listed as vacant at the front desk, but housekeeping discovers it to be filled with bags, personal items, or even people.
This is the result of a discrepancy between your booking systems and the reality of your hotel. It happens when your systems aren’t accurately aligned and can result in wasted time and inconvenience.
Avoid these issues with a reliable channel manager
While annoying and potentially harmful, all 3 of these issues can be avoided by using the right channel manager. Channel manager software — like ours at Hotel-Spider — is designed to make the process of managing your hotel easier, smoother, and more reliable.
This is how a channel manager helps avoid the above 3 problems@
- Your prices and availabilities are synchronised across all booking channels, so any listings on OTA platforms will be changed to reflect the actual rate on your hotel website, avoiding any rate discrepancy issues.
- All your online sales channels are integrated with the channel manager, which allows you to centralise your inventory and all relevant information about reservations in one place, minimising the risk of overbookings.
- By gaining greater insight into your hotel operations, a channel manager helps you quickly and accurately identify which rooms are vacant and which are occupied to reduce the risk of room discrepancies. If any discrepancies are found, it’s easy to update the system to reflect this.
Contact us to find out more about how Hotel-Spider uses tools like the channel manager to help you run a more efficient, successful hotel that delivers the best possible experiences to your guests.
