How can you increase hotel bookings online in times of crisis?

The internet is full of special offers from hotels that sell their rooms at very low prices especially through portals. The big guys in the market, Expedia, Booking.com, Last Minute and so many others are squeezing the hotels and especially the independent hotels to give low, very low prices to the visitors of those portals. The crisis is the perfect excuse to make more money for the portals. The lower the prices the more the hits, more bookings so more commissions.

Now, my proposal is simple. Now is the time to use our brain as hoteliers, we need to work out a simple strategy of online pricing, maintaining or not price parity since today parity parity is only a theory and give to ourselves more visibility.

Visibility means, presence, professional presence in the different social media, serious and professional SEO and really user friendly mostly customer friendly online booking tools. Tools that give you the functionalities you need to spread your offers in the Blog sphere, in the Social Media Jungle and reach your end customer without a cent of commission.

Do those systems exist? The answer is yes. A Spanish company has developed this system and it works really well. Sybelio has the capability to do that without the hotel to need to invest crazy amounts of money and without a cent of commission.

I was talking to Daniele Pesavento, the Sales and Marketing Director and he has given me a demo of the system which at the beginning seems to be another online booking tool. After seeing that it does the job in 14 languages, it has a very powerful special offer module that can create any type of offer and the way that those offers can be linked to all the Social Media I was more than convinced to connect it my hotel web site if I had one.