Length of stay influenced promotions and pricing may yield better for mid-market hoteliers in India.
RezNext, leading hotel distribution switch has published a report on guest booking patterns, and other key insights that hoteliers can leverage to drive more business.
The following insights are arrived from analyzing 3000 bookings that have flowed through RezNext’s real-time distribution platform in the last quarter in India.
“Distribution Insights is our industry report that equips our hotel and demand generator partners with information that can be extremely useful to them in running their day to day room distribution business. This report highlights the best performing markets, customer segments and also has insights into what promotions could work well based on the advanced bookings and the length of stay pattern. These bookings have flowed through the RezNext’s real-time distribution platform and have helped hoteliers automate their reservation process. More importantly hoteliers have been able to quickly act on their cancellations and make those rooms available for sale immediately.” Mike Kistner, Chief Executive Officer, RezNext Global Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Key insights from the report
The average length of stay as per this report is at 1.66. This is valuable information to hoteliers who can custom design promotions and packages around this with an extended check out. This may appear more appropriate and lucrative to guests. Also pricing strategies must be influenced by length of stay.
Average room rent
Across 2-4 star hotels, average room rent was Rs. 3655 for 1 night. Large number of rooms were booked for 1 night stay. The average rates also vary according to the number of nights booked for. Again the length of stay must be a key component influencing the hotel’s pricing strategies.
When do bookings peak up? Do weekends perform better?
This is an interesting insight for hoteliers. Thursdays are the best day for hoteliers with most bookings being recorded. Hoteliers can use this to plan the timing of their promotions.
Thursday is followed by Monday. Guess the prospect of traveling is very appealing to the mind on a Monday!
Week days performed better than weekends. This is important information for hoteliers. Have you compared how your weekend emailer performed when compared to your weekday emailer on your offerings?
Which days drive better occupancy?
Thursday and Wednesdays are the top performing days in this category. Hoteliers can use this information to look at what other tactics they could deploy to balance their occupancy on other days.
Top cities that saw more hotel bookings
South India tops this category with Bangalore leading among the cities followed by Hyderabad and Chennai. Other cities that had higher bookings in order of their performance are Shillong, Gurgaon, New Delhi, Kolkata.
How close to arrival do guests book hotels?
Guests booking hotels 2-6 days before arrival ranked highest in this category (26%).
Hoteliers must leverage this insight and can plan to have more opaque deals and deals of the week, that drive more bookings through this period.
At the same time if hoteliers also have same day discounts and promotions available, it will create a sense of urgency for the guest looking to travel on the same day (19%). This is important because the second highest category in this report are of people making the booking on the same day, followed by those making a booking a day before travel (16.28%).
The number of people planning their hotel stay in advance by a month is very few (3.53%). It shows more men are booking in advance by a month, than women.
Largely travel is becoming more of a spontaneous reaction, based either on a business requirement or may be an impulse holiday.
Real-time analysis of room booking is very important
A significant number of booking were cancelled on the same day of booking (72%) and 2-6 days before arrival (21.49%). If hoteliers do not have real-time updates happening in their system, these cancellations can go unnoticed for some time and this time lag can result in an opportunity loss for the hotelier. Hoteliers need to know their cancellations real-time. They can then quickly design a discounted offering for that particular day to put their otherwise perishable inventory to use.
These bookings have flowed through the RezNext real-time distribution platform and as a result hoteliers have been able to automatically capture these details and act in time to put these cancelled rooms back into the market again.
Business vs Leisure
During the period of this study, business hotels have performed better than leisure hotels. An indication that corporate travel is probably on the rise.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
