Different Customers Require Different Hotel Content

[Glenn Dean]

Picking the right hotel is one of the most important aspects of planning a trip. Different types of travelers will look for different features in a hotel. Understanding the different types of traveler is critical to identifying the hotel that meets their specific needs.

There is so much more to booking a hotel room than simply availability and price. Luckily, easy to use hotel reservation software is available to help agents as well as consumers research and book the right hotel based on a customer's individual needs and preferences.

Business travelers may look for a hotel close to the city business center that provides access to conference rooms & business services.Onsite catering and ballroom facilities combined with a large number of guest rooms may be important for those planning a conference or large family gathering. Proximity to sporting venues or concert facilities may be important for leisure travelers looking for a long weekend getaway to support their team or seea favorite artist perform live. And those planning their annual vacation will look for hotels and resorts that offer the activities they enjoy most whether that beeasy access to the Ski slopes or being steps away from the beach.

Just like each hotel is different, so are the different hotel content options available. Many content providers specialize in certain geographic locations or type of hotels, while others may focus primarily on room rates or special amenities. Even travel agency consortia agreements may impact which content provider your hotel booking engine should use to best to meet your customer's needs.

Today's hotel reservation software combines a variety of tools and content to make the process of researching and booking a hotel much easier than even just a few years ago. Most have some type of Geographic Coding to help find a hotel in exactly the right location. You can check a hotel's proximity to anything from a city convention center to a favorite beach.

Searches can be performedby property "star" rating and special amenitiescan even be booked for your guests. For the budget conscious, most have the ability to easily search for a hotel room by price.

If you do plan to compete on price, you'll need to keep a close eye on the market and make sure your hotel booking engine has access to the best room rates at the right hotels. Here the key is for you to identify the provider with the hotel content your customers are looking and negotiate the best price. Hotel booking software with reporting capabilities that help easily track what customers are booking as well as searching for will be helpful with this endeavor. This type of information can be extremely valuable when considering hotel content providers and help you determine what hotels are most important to your business.

The key to success is finding a technology partner that offers a hotel booking engine with the right features combined with the flexibility to access the content your clients are looking for. With a little research, you can find an online booking solution that will have your business working smarter and earning more.

In this article author writes about Odysseus Solutions. Some of the more advanced hotel booking engine available today will even track the number of searches made for a specific cruise line or itinerary, helping travel agents identify what their customers are looking for online.