Increasing your occupancy is a daily struggle for every Hotel, Hostel and B&B owner. Every business has its own strategy and sometimes revenues are just not satisfactory. Coming up with a profitable strategy for your Hotel, Hostel and B&B is not easy.
First of all, the key to create the best strategy is to know the target market. Let’s not forget you should know your surroundings, meaning that you should see what your competition is doing, perfect timing can have an outstanding results with small changes you make. NEVER say that you don’t have any competition and don’t start off by saying that we are the REAL deal. Not paying attention at your competitors can cost you in the long term.
Start promoting, make a package deal, use different holidays like: Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Independence Day, this was you can start to attract more customers.
To do a promotion, it’s good to start with Online Traveling Agencies “OTAs” where your property is listed such as Booking.com, Hostelworld.com, Expedia.com, Airbnb.com est. since they already have the tools for you to make a promotion on their site.
Booking.com has e feature called “Visibility Booster” (I use this from time to time at my Hostel), and what this does, it improves your ranking on their site. To use this feature that booking.com offers, you need to increase you commission fee that you pay to booking.com. I usually use this feature during the low season when the competition is at its highest.
Hostelworld.com has a feature called “Feature Listings” and to use this feature you need to pay for it. What this does is that it gives you premium visibility on their site by listing your property at the Listed Properties. Another feature that I use is “Elevate” where by increasing your service fee percentage, where you can improve the ranking of your property on the Hostelworld.com website. I use this feature constantly for my hostel, sometimes I increase the commission fee to get better ranking depending of course on the ranking of my competitors.
You should also make good use of multiple social media platforms in the market. Each reservation that comes from your social media platforms, you make more money since you are not paying the commission fee for every booking. What I did for my hostel is; I have updated the cover picture and have added “Book Directly for 10% discount”, this way guests pays less for the reservation and I still earn more compared to the commission fees from OTAs. But bare in mind that OTAs are still your main source for getting more reservations. I hope that these tips were helpful enough for you, and have had a positive impact for your property. Any feedback and also tips from you would be much appreciated, with the aim of helping fellow hostel owners.