WuBook_logo.svg

Official blog

Search
exploit booking data

Reservation data: valuable information to improve your offering

Contents

Dear WuBookers, in addition to securing revenue and receipts, reservations are an important source of information that can help improve the offer of hotels, B&Bs, and vacation rentals. In this article we look into how to leverage them to get even more out of your business strategy.

What data is obtained through reservations

When a customer decides to stay at an accommodation, they provide the hotelier with personal information such as: first and last name, nationality, e-mail address and phone number. This data is essential to reserve the accommodation (in compliance, of course, with the terms of payment) and to enable the institutional reports to be sent to the local authorities, when required.

exploit booking data

In addition to these, however, the hotelier may also collect other details about the guests and reservations obtained, including:

  • demographic data, such as customer and occupancy type;
  • preferences or special requests, such as the type of room or its characteristics (smoking and non-smoking, with sea view, ground floor, with or without outdoor space, etc.);
  • online behavior, i.e., acquisition channel (website, OTA, other), booking window, amount of reservations made during the year, and more.

All of this information put together can be leveraged to improve one’s business offerings and, as a result, increase rates of booking.

3 ways to leverage reservation data

In general, the data collected are useful for knowing your target guests better, and targeting your communication and sales strategy more effectively. But also to bring out new opportunities and needs for changes to the facility and its services.

Let’s give a few examples.

1. Adapt the structure and enhance its qualities

Knowing who your customers are serves to anticipate their needs and ensure that their expectations are met or even exceeded.

Are most guests from abroad or perhaps from a particular country? They are likely to prefer to be welcomed and to communicate in their own language with the staff.
Are these young families with young children? They might appreciate some extra in-room accessories, such as changing tables or baby-eating baskets, but also equipped common areas designed for them, such as play areas or baby clubs.
Are they predominantly elderly? Spaces adequate for movement even for those with mobility difficulties, good lighting, clear signage, and easy-to-use tools will make them feel comfortable.

Once you understand what guests are looking for or like, you need to make the most of it: it is important that the facility’s pluses are highlighted well on the various communication channels and that they are described in the best way possible (sometimes, a good photograph is worth a thousand words!).

exploit booking data

2. Implement new services and personalize the experience

Preferences expressed when booking, or when the guest is already in the facility, can also give us useful indications for implementing offers and services.
This is the case, for example, of food sensitivities that – if repeated – could lead to the creation of ad hoc menus (vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, but also kosher and halal) or to collaborations with local restaurants that specialize in certain types of cuisine.

If several people request extensions to check-in and check-out times it might be worth modifying them or adding a small extra charge for these exceptions: thus you will increase the services available and earnings, without being too strict with your clientele.

In fact, although it is necessary to provide standards across multiple types of customers – especially for larger facilities and times of greater influx – personalization of the experience can ensure trust, satisfaction, and customer loyalty over time.

3. Developing supply and encouraging demand

So far, we have talked about structural or service-charter-related changes in general, but a separate chapter deals with supply in the sense of availability, rates and promotions.

In this sense, personal and user behavior data are key to optimizing one’s business strategy and improving hotel revenue.

For example, analyzing the origin and main acquisition channels of your clientele could lead you to favor some platforms over others, also focusing your investments according to the territorial spread of the portals.

The booking window, or the time between the date of booking and arrival at the facility, is another essential aspect. Suppose you have an average booking window of 5 days and you want to lengthen this period to sell rooms earlier. One solution is to work on rates, that is, on prices and cancellation conditions, for example by adding an early booking offer that encourages people to book earlier with favorable conditions.

These are only hypothetical cases, but in order to make sensible decisions, one needs to have a complete overview of occupancy trends, taking into account all the data that contribute to a good revenue management strategy.

Of course, for this to happen, it is necessary to process said data – of customers and reservations – in an organized way. In other words, we cannot expect to do in-depth analysis on a piece of paper: you need at the very least a structured and evolved spreadsheet or, even better, the support of a hotel management software.

exploit booking data

Zak for obtaining and exploiting reservation data

Zak, WuBook’s PMS for accommodations, is a comprehensive and powerful tool that addresses all the major operational needs of hotels, B&Bs and vacation rentals. These include the collection of data and its organization for analytical purposes.

In Zak’s reservations area, in fact, it is possible to make filtered searches for different parameters such as: channel of origin, treatment chosen, status of the reservation (confirmed, to be confirmed, and so on), name of the agency or company that made it (if it is not private).

This allows navigating through the reservations received in an agile and fast way, displaying general information at a glance without going into the details of each individual reservation.

In addition, each guest also has a Notes field, where they can freely jot down remarks or details related to their needs; while the hotelier can create customer labels – not visible to the end user – to summarize certain characteristics, such as “Smoker,” “Celiac,” and so on. In this way, both can use the booking tool to convey and keep track of any important information both for the individual stay and for subsequent macroscopic readings. But that is not the end of the story.

Another extremely developed tool within Zak is the Statistical Report. This is a module for obtaining statistical data for purposes of yield and revenue management. This shows, for example: the total revenue, the revenue generated from room sales only, the revenue derived from all meals, the revenue from booking extras, the percentage ratio between the production generated from rooms only and the total production, the rooms available, the rooms closed, and the rooms sold, the percentage ratio of rooms sold to rooms available, revenue per available room (RevPAR), average daily rate of rooms sold (ADR index), total revenue per available room (TrevPAR), and total revenue per occupied room (TrevPOR). Hoteliers can choose to view all or only some of this information by selecting the periods of their interest.

In addition to these, you have also data related to:

  • booking window;
  • reservations and stays occurred on a certain day;
  • nationality of the guests;
  • average age of the guests who stayed.

As we have seen, when properly interpreted, all this information can provide insights to effectively modify one’s supply and stimulate future reservations. But the first step is to equip yourself with the right business tools – Zak is one of them.

About WuBook:

We help customers to have easy access to the best technologies in the tourism industry to grow their business.
PMS – CHANNEL MANAGER – BOOKING ENGINE for Hotel, B&B, Hostels and Vacation rentals.
Find out more.

Categories: