Since they typically deal with a particular geographical region and
work with multiple hotels, market managers usually have a deep understanding of how
the online marketplace for your city works and can thus provide valuable insights and
advice on strategies to help maximize your business and profitability.
In addition, many OTAs are increasingly supplementing this with self-service
options on their extranet-based systems, which provide hotels with
information on booking patterns in their particular market as a whole,
as well as allowing them to compare their performance with customizable,
competitive sets of other hotels.
Such information is not just useful for working with the OTA in question, but
can help drive the hotel's overall distribution strategy.
For example, being able to see that your direct competitors are all consistently
achieving higher rates than you may be an indication that you're underpriced and
that you need to increase your rates across all channels.
Similarly, seeing that the city is empty next month
can help you plan additional marketing actions to generate additional demand for
your property at what you have now been forewarned will be a very quiet period.
Getting access to such macro-level and
competitive data is a superb benefit of working with an OTA and
one that will be difficult and expensive to acquire otherwise.
Thus it can be seen that there is a whole host of
highly specific benefits to working with the right set of OTAs.
However, here the key word is working.
Using an OTA is not simply a matter of signing up and
presuming that the bookings will automatically come flowing in.