In this blog, I will be touching upon all the aspects related to it, along with some tips to do your hotel’s room inventory management effectively.

What is Hotel Room Inventory Management?

Room inventory management is allocating your property’s room nights evenly without compromising the resulting revenue. If done correctly, it can help you maximise your hotel’s sales and minimise unsold room nights.

It’s one of the important tasks where the sales and front office staff have to work conjointly, since both departments manage various sources of bookings.

However, I’ve seen many hotels allocate inventory vaguely, without proper analysis. Let me share my experience with you. 

I used to work for a well known OTA as a hotel contracting specialist. This involved onboarding accommodation facility providers, updating their saleable room inventory, and running promotions on their listings.

But when asked to share the inventory count, many hoteliers would say random numbers. Budget hotels usually took this kind of approach due to low room count; and filling rooms is a priority than the sources. 

Such casual behaviour towards room inventory management by hotels can lead to various problems. Let’s discuss why you should be doing it in the first place. 

Why Should Hotels Focus on Room Inventory Management?

Room nights are perishable inventory, hence hoteliers have to channelise the sales through various sources like websites, OTAs, social media platforms and offline sales.

To achieve 100% occupancy or at least 60%, the room inventory needs to be distributed strategically. If you under-allocate your rooms on any of the platforms, you tend to lose last-minute bookings from that channel.

On the other hand, if you over-allocate the inventory, you may end up with various sold-out cases in your bucket. 

Apart from that, uneven distribution of room inventory will impact your targeted annual revenue, depending on your unsold nights. 

How to Distribute Room Inventory of Your Hotel?

Well, now that you know why your hotel’s room inventory management is a vital process, here are some tips that can help you in doing it effectively. 

1. Analyse Sources of Bookings

Begin with gathering information about your hotel’s sources of bookings, both online and offline. Make a list of all the on-ground partners, OTAs, social media pages, and other online channels along with the business they have provided to you. 

It’s better if the data is on a day-to-day, MTD, and YTD basis. Once you have the statistics, align them in descending order.

Based on this, you can distribute the inventory to gain maximum business from top providers. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore the other ones that have not performed well.

You can redesign your strategies, work out on offers, and approach those platforms in a new way.  

2. Check Performance On OTAs

Here are some statistics from Statista on OTAs’ contribution to the hospitality industry that are sure to blow your minds: 

That’s huge, I Know. And considering the pace at which the hospitality industry is going digital, OTAs would be a trillion dollar industry. 

So, do keep a check on the business generated from OTAs. Also, see which are popular amongst travelers and register your property on them. 

In case if you find any platform where the booking inflow is low, contact your property/account manager. Additionally, for the time being, keep the room inventory count low for that source. 

3. Invest Time in Guest Segmentation

Whilst you are focusing on sources of bookings, do not forget the different types of guests. It’ll help you allocate room inventory in a better way.

For instance, if your property is a business hotel, then the majority of your guests would be corporate employees. Hence, you can dedicate a higher count of room inventory to the partnered organisations.

Or, if you are a resort which is preferred by large groups and families, then your focus should be on offline travel agents, tour guides, event and trip planners. 

Similarly, you need to determine your audience and share your hotel’s room inventory with sources of bookings accordingly. 

4. Ease Out The Task With Technology

Room inventory management is definitely a tedious task, as you need to update the available inventory on a regular basis for all booking channels. Also, remembering passwords for all the dashboards is another challenge.

However, technology has made this task easier for hoteliers. With the help of a robust PMS and right channel manager, you can do this in a couple of minutes. You just need to check if the former one supports easy integration.

Further, if you need more clarity on factors to consider before opting for a PMS, here’s a complete guide for you. 

Another reason to use these software is automation. Because of that, updating room inventory as closed during sold-out situations becomes easier. 

However, I’ve seen many hotels marking themselves as sold-out on OTAs during peak season to facilitate maximum direct bookings. 

I would say don’t do that. Instead, you can smartly channelise it through offline sources. 

Didn’t get it? Let me explain. 

5. Don’t Forget Offline Sources

Travel agents have been an integral part of the hospitality industry for a long time, even before the internet came into existence. 

However, with OTAs in the picture, these travel agents lost their hold on the market to a great extent. In fact, the ones dealing in the B2B segment had to get themselves online to promote their business. 

Hence, many hotels prefer online booking platforms over travel agents. But, let me give you an insight. 

Even though OTAs have larger discounts, when it comes to booking a group or family trip, guests still prefer going to travel agents for packages. Especially during peak season, they reach out to trip planners to get an end-to-end solution.

So, while you update room inventory for online platforms, allocate some to offline agents as well. Just invert this process during peak periods.

Trust me, this tip will definitely come in handy during your hotel’s room inventory management.

6. Promote Last-minute Booking

One of the trending ways that hotels approach to achieve 100% occupancy is promoting last-minute bookings. This is the last strategy to be followed during your hotel’s room inventory management. 

The reason I kept it for the end is that if not done correctly, this technique can backfire. I even have a relevant example to prove it. 

When I used to work in a known OTA, one of my clients activated a last-minute offer to get maximum bookings. However, he failed to put an end date for the same. 

This resulted in bookings being made at discounted rates for the entire week, leading to a loss of around ₹30,000. Since they made the error at the hotelier’s end, the property had to honor the reservations. 

So you see, if you are resorting to last-minute bookings to achieve 100% occupancy, ensure you do it in the right way. Here’s a blog you can refer to for the same. 

How to increase last-minute bookings?

How to Do Your Hotel’s Room Inventory Management on OTAs Effectively?

As I said earlier, OTAs hold a majority share in the online booking market. And you need to have robust planning to manage them effectively. Because if you go with your hotel’s room distribution haphazardly, it’s going to affect your revenue. 

Here are some tips on how to do it properly. 

1. Update Inventory for Longer Duration

First of all, you need to understand that not everyone makes spontaneous travel plans. Some people plan for later too. 

For instance, many events like sunburn, travel fest, and food fairs are scheduled at the start of the year. Hence, people attending such events need to plan their stay accordingly.

Not only such events, long weekends and holidays also fall in this list. That’s why, it’s better if you update your inventory for a longer duration.

Websites like Booking.com, Expedia, and other renowned OTAs allow you to update your hotel’s room inventory for 1 year. This means that if guests are trying to book a stay at your property even for 6 months later, they can do that. 

But, don’t forget to update your hotel’s tariff too for that duration. 

2. Bring Revenue Management Services to Aid

These days, a lot of hoteliers are opting for revenue management software (RMS) or hiring revenue managers. It helps them in shrugging off the burden of calculating, updating, and monitoring rates every moment.

Apart from this, revenue managers guide you on:

• Booking platform that provides good business
• Packages that your hotel should promote
• Offers that can help in increasing business
• Improvements needed to bring an influx of bookings
• Other opportunities to maximise your annual revenue

Basically, a huge part of a hotel’s business development is transferred to revenue managers, which they handle efficiently with help of RMS and, of course, their experience. 

To help you learn more about this topic, here’s an archive of some of our best blogs on RMS. 

Learn Everything About Revenue Management Here

3. Ensure Rate Parity Across All Channels

As I said above, that I was working with an OTA, another challenge we faced on a regular basis was rate parity. And this was a big problem; not only for luxury hotels, but also for budget properties. 

The reason being, every OTA has a different commission structure. Generally, it ranges from 8 to 25%. Hence, it’s obvious that hotels would update higher tariffs on platforms where they shed more commission. 

However, displaying different rates on portals can result in uneven business flow. For example, if you update a tariff of 100 USD on Booking.com and 125 USD on Go-MMT, guests would prefer the former one. 

Which means, your booking flow from the latter one will go down, and eventually due to rate discrepancy you’d lose a source of business. That’s why it’s vital that you maintain rate parity across all the platforms. 

4. Update Proper Cancellation Policies

Another factor you need to consider during your hotel’s room inventory management is cancellation policies. It’s no secret that guests tend to cancel travel plans at the last moment. 

It can be due to some change in plans, intriguing deals at other properties, or some unexpected circumstances. In either of these situations, it’s the hotels who suffer the loss. 

In fact, this is more problematic when the bookings are at pay at hotel mode. Therefore, when you allocate inventory on OTA, ensure that you update cancellation policies. 

Pro-tip: Keep a zero or 50% refund policy if the bookings are cancelled less than a week before the check-in date. In this way, you’d be able to avoid huge losses and have ample time to get those unsold rooms booked. 

5. Keep a Check on Cut-off Periods

For the final check, keep your cut-off period for a minimum of 1 day and maximum of 3 days. Now, if you are unsure of what the cut-off period is, let me tell you about it. 

Cut-off period is the time set by hotels up to which the guests can book their stay. Post-that the inventory would be shown as sold-out. 

Let’s say you’ve updated the cut-off period as 3 days. This means that guests can book their stay up to 3 days prior to their check-in date. However, if they want to reserve a room on the same day, your property would be shown as sold-out. 

This part is useful if you plan to up-sell your inventory or facilitate direct bookings. However, if you’ve a lot of unsold inventory, update the cut-off period as -24 hours. It will enable you to fetch last-minute bookings. 

This part is useful if you plan to up-sell your inventory or facilitate direct bookings. However, if you’ve a lot of unsold inventory, update the cut-off period as -24 hours. It will enable you to fetch last-minute bookings. 

The post Optimise Your Hotel’s Room Inventory Management For Better Occupancy appeared first on eZee Absolute.

1. How to Check-in the Guest using eZee Absolute Hotel Management System?

The front desk is the first point of contact for any guest that comes at your doorstep. Among all that, check-in obviously becomes the foremost operation that you need to perform.

They way you perform your check-in, the time taken and how you deal with guests during their check-in poses as the first impression of your hotel on your guests.

This video explains how eZee Absolute hotel management system makes your check-in instant and simple, which eventually enhances your guest experience.

2. How to take payments using eZee Absolute Hotel Management System?

Billing and payment is a significant activity at any hotel. Hotels these days, usually accept payments in several modes, viz. cash, bank transfer, credit and debit cards. Besides, some of your guests may also wish to pay you partially through different ways. Here’s where taking payments get complicated.

This video takes you through different payment scenarios which you can tackle effortlessly through eZee Absolute cloud-based hotel software.

3. How to check-out the guest using eZee Absolute Hotel Management System?

Besides check-in, check-out is a complex task for any hotel front-desk. You need to check all the payment settlements, keep the invoice ready; all the while ensuring that you don’t make your guest wait.

With quick and error-free check-out process using eZee Absolute hotel PMS, you’ll proudly be able to ask for feedbacks from your happy guests.

4. A complete hotel data analysis tool – Innalytics by eZee

Keeping a tab on your hotel’s performance is an important part of your hotel management. On the same lines, you definitely need solid and accurate stats in order to formulate the best strategies to grow your hotel business.

Owing to these requisites, we came up with our most loved feature of Innalytics – a complete hotel data analysis tool.

This video talks about all that Innalytics is and provides to hotels, right from most revenue-generating channels to the best promotions and packages and to each data that would help hotels in devising strong strategies for their hotel growth.

5. How to perform night audit using eZee Absolute Hotel Management System?

Night audit. One of the most-necessary operation for any hotel. You cannot simply ignore or avoid it. Because like every business owner, you too need an overall wrap-up to your day. How many arrivals, how many departures, how many guests were no-show, how much payment was taken; well the list is endless.

You get all of this information in the Night Audit process that you do when your day ends. That being said, if the night audit is lengthy and inaccurate, it may become tedious for you.

This video tells you how straightforward the night audit process becomes with our hotel management system.

6. How to add extra charges and inclusions in eZee Absolute Hotel Management System?

Your day-to-day operations of adding extra charges and inclusions on any transaction become the simplest with eZee Absolute hotel software.

This is a video which explains you the concept of extra charges and inclusions if you’re not aware of it, and guides you on how to put them effectively into practice at your hotel using eZee Absolute.

7. How to take group bookings in eZee Absolute Hotel Management System?

Handling individual and single booking is easy, but how about handling group reservations?

Taking group bookings takes up a lot of your front desk’s time, as you need to add the detail of all the group members, allocate the specific rooms to them and so on.  

Well, our this video shows how smooth it becomes to handle group bookings through our cloud-based hotel management system.

8. How to perform stop sell for your hotel in eZee Extranet?

Many times, it may happen that due to some or the other reason, you have to block your inventories from getting booked.

Now these sudden changes affect your inventory distribution planning to a great extent. Also when you are listed on several OTAs, it becomes very difficult to login to each one’s extranet and stop the sale of your inventories.

This video shows you how to stop sell your inventory by a single click on all your connected channels right from our channel manager, without having to login to each extranet and do this manually.

9. How to manage your hotel’s housekeeping using eZee Absolute Hotel Management System?

Housekeeping, one of the crucial aspect for your hotel management. This is our video on how eZee Absolute facilitates your housekeeping operations apart from other front-office and back-office tasks.

Housekeeping might seem as an easy part to manage, but it’s actually very extensive. Any flaws in housekeeping may lead to guest displeasure and degraded guest experience.

Check out this video to know how eZee Absolute expertly manages your hotel’s housekeeping to the max.

10. How to print and email reservation voucher in eZee Absolute Hotel Management System?

Reservation vouchers are an imperative part of a hotel booking. You know very well that your guests (especially those cranky ones) won’t stay put until you provide them with a reservation voucher. And most often, you may face guests who want that in email.

This is where you’d need to print and email reservation vouchers of the bookings you received in the hotel PMS. These bookings may include your walk-ins, those from hotel website and even from the OTAs.

This video tells you how to perform this activity as and when you or your guest requires.

Besides this, we published loads of other videos on YouTube, to guide you with the best hotel management practices.

And that’s not it. We’re coming up with more such exciting and useful videos this year. Till then, stay tuned and subscribe to our YouTube channel to not miss out on any new video.

The post Our 10 Most Viewed Videos of 2018 appeared first on eZee Absolute.

Well, for some of your fellow hoteliers; this still might not be a reason powerful enough to invest in a tool called channel manager. If you too are looking for a compelling conviction on why to invest in leading-edge distribution automation technology, read on:

Hotelier and Channel Manager: The connection

Room availability and rates; these are prime factors that govern the ROI of your hotel business. You are well aware that managing an optimum level of rates and occupancy is sheer essentiality, and it falls completely under your span of control. Not to forget that this is a continuous process (a full-time job for those who perform it manually) to be followed day in and day out at any accommodation.

Therefore, it is indispensable to evaluate the number of efforts, time, energy and payroll that are dedicated to maintaining them manually. Just imagine, what if you can automate this process and get rid of manual operations? Wouldn’t it be a giant relief? Hence, for you to get a channel manager and ease up, we have accumulated top “7 reasons as to why hotels need a channel manager”.

1. Easily add new booking channels for your hotel. The more the better!

Multi-channel booking strategy is what works best in any season. A hotelier following this does not have to depend on limited booking sources. The more sources that bring you booking, the better and safer it is for your business. Implementing a channel manager at your property gives you access to hundreds of connected channels. A channel manager bridges your property with all those booking platforms, displays your inventory to crowds of bookers looking for accommodation in your city and brings you paid bookings. Moreover, being connected to online platforms has more advantages such as,

• Higher distribution reach,

• Demand generation,

• Higher ROI,

• Variety of booking sources,
• And, get seen by regional as well as global bookers.

2. Single dashboard for strategic inventory and rate management

Tiresome inventory management becomes hassle free once you deploy a channel manager to do that. Moreover,

• You get a single dashboard that gives you an insightful overview of availability and rates distributed on all connected channels.

• Minimized human intervention with system to push and pull data. You can post and manage precise room rates and inventory allocation with minimum efforts.

• You can send out pooled inventory to channels to acquire maximum bookings from any channel, without worrying about overbookings.

• Your room rates and availability are always in sync and latest to the moment across all channels, so that your staff does not need to sit and pass on inventory refill and updates. 

• You can post restrictions and inclusions; while processing new, modified and cancelled reservations centrally.

• Rates on different OTAs, vacation rental portals, metasearch platforms and even your own website; manage it from one-place.
• You can manage multiple properties too.

Everything automated. Just send a command and system does it for you. Instead of manual operations, you can focus and strategize better distribution.

3. Time saving automation with even 365 days calendar update

Without a software, inventory and rate distribution across channels is a do-it-yourself task for you. You might miss something, and it can cause errors, double bookings, wrong or delayed updates and a lot many unpredictable mistakes. Duh! And then comes correction part, consuming more of your time. You might lose track of updates. You might never realize if your sent update was never executed at OTA end. What a sad life, isn’t it?

Now think of a channel manager that can magically take all this of your pain away. Yes, a channel manager would not make humanly(!) mistakes or errors, maintain update logs, keep control on overbookings, keep inventory and rates always latest and synced, and notify you of updates communicated to OTA. Take a sigh of relief, I know you are getting a Channel Manager for your hotel now.
Moreover, you can update calendar even for an entire year if you want on channels that support it, in just a click. Let the system take care of rate updates and while you sit back and enjoy your time conversing with a guest or two.

4. Quick stop sale and auto-updates. Do more with lesser efforts

Imagine a sticky situation when suddenly a group demands bookings and you need to use up inventory that is currently allocated to and live on a given travel site. I know there remains a sense of fear while stopping the sale manually. So many to-and-fro operations might overwhelm you. This is when a system like channel manager comes to your rescue.

If you are sending room rates and occupancy details too frequently; you might as well need to ask a particular channel to stop selling a certain part of your inventory. Later on you might release inventory. All you have to do is click on stop sale button and system will automatically put a halt to online sale of your inventory on a that channel. Not only saving you repeated efforts, it also prevents revenue loss you might suffer due to this errors.

Just a channel manager and there you go….No more mismatching inventory, no more revenue leakage, no more delay, no more overbooking. All you have is swift and simple distribution with real time updates at remarkably reduced manual efforts!

5. Minimize over bookings and under-bookings. Utilize complete inventory!

A channel manager comes up with several built-in mechanisms that help you effectively prevent overbookings and under-bookings. Sometimes, you might end up receiving more bookings than your physical capacity, and bingo! your inventory is oversold.

On the other hand, due to uneven distribution, possibly you might not be using inventory to the fullest capacity, that is, under-bookings! Without a channel manager when you go out to resolve this, it can prove to be the toughest job ever.

Just some human or technical errors might cost your hotel loss of reputation, decreased customer loyalty and much more. At such times, channel manager keeps on trying in back-end multiple times until a request sent to OTA is not successful in order to save you from overselling. And it notifies you as well with execution status. So, you need to have that channel manager because you know you cannot afford to sit and keep a tab on updates communicated to OTAs and their statuses.

6. Effortless rate parity maintenance

It can be tricky when you see your demand increased and your want to make the most of it. Might as well you want to give out rooms on discounted rates to your guests, which becomes easy as a pie with a distribution tool.

Channel manager systems are developed to automatically maintain efficient rates to ensure that any changes you make on system are unanimously updated across all platforms in real-time, leaving no room for errors. Thus, you can avoid rate disparity and enhance your hotel’s online reputation.

7. Yield Management features for skyrocketing efficiency

More than just a number Best Available Rate (BAR) is a way to achieve optimal revenue. It’s a brainstorming task to set up a dynamic rate plans and derive the most suitable room price of the day.

If you have a channel manager, it can help you sell right room at right price at right time; that too, automatically. Owing to high/low occupancy at your property, system will hike up or slash down room rates to sell each and every room for you. Sounds like a smart idea to increase bookings? That’s the most effective yield management.

Done, there you go! Now that you have assimilated the top reason why you should get a channel manager, there is one more thing you should know about. Before you begin evaluating an online distribution tool for your property, do keep in mind these points.

• Channel manager should give you connection with your already existing booking channels.

• Channel manager provider should be able to quickly connect you with channel of your choice so that you can broaden your reach.

• How about foreign currency conversions in system?
• It should integrate with systems that you use at your property. For example, it should integrate with a hotel PMS or booking engine, so that you operate on a live inventory at any given time.

Final takeaway: The good, The better, the best

Without a channel manager,

• Every morning you rush to update all calendars with live rates and the latest occupancy.

• Keep worrying about overbookings or missed bookings.

• Repeat those same time-consuming tasks every day.
• You might lose that potential revenue you could’ve earned otherwise.

With a channel manager, you can

• Enjoy your morning coffee while interacting with your guests.

• Leave the front desk and take a vacation too. You have a channel manager on mobile to check and update rates if and when you wish to.

• Automate recurring operations to save time and money and master productivity.
• Earn higher ROI with no revenue leakage.

Because you have the tech way to manage it.

Decide now, how do you wish to spend the rest of your life as a hotelier? With or without a channel manager?

The post 7 Ultimate Reasons Why You Should Invest in A Hotel Channel Manager appeared first on eZee Absolute.