Going Online Helps Independent Hotels Cope with Competition

With the continued growth of the Internet´s popularity, Independent hotels have their best chance ever to truly compete with their franchise competition. For many years, hotels have chosen to flag their hotels in order to cash-in on franchise loyalty and popularity and the resulting reservations contribution.

Although franchise contributions to reservations vary greatly by brand and by hotel, buying a flag almost always provided a hotel with a base of business to ensure successful sales numbers. The franchise flag provides big budget advertising, promotions, reservations services, and, in some cases, group sales services; a combination unavailable to most independent hotels.

But, thanks to the Internet, all that is changing. Internet marketing is still affordable and effective. The Internet provides little known hotels with unprecedented exposure to millions of travelers. It allows smaller independent hotels to advertise their hotels to the traveling world, finally at rates they can afford.

Through the Global Distribution System even smaller hotels can take advantage of the sales efforts of thousands of travel agents, just like the franchises have for years.

Although Global Distribution System contribution has been stagnant for many months, many experts predict that this will begin a reversal in coming months.

Franchises have held on to mandatory GDS rights and for years GDS production has been at the heart of their contribution numbers for their hotels for years. Independent hotels now have the same access to joining the GDS though companies like GenaRes, an independent GDS service provider.

Fortunately for independent hotels, third-party internet suppliers are still “ruling the roost” in Internet generated room nights and revenue. Franchises have made great progress over the last two years playing catch-up with third-party web suppliers, but there has been a cost to doing so. Their primary weapon in the fight with suppliers has been the amazing “guaranteed lowest rate”. This tactic has met with some success, but it is creating havoc with the hotels they are duty-bound to help.

Third-party suppliers have held the number one position in search engine marketing as well. They single-handedly took over the pay-per-click search world. It´s difficult to find a city in which a search does not reveal a third-party supplier in the results.

Independent hotels are starting to understand and use pay-per-click search technology for their own websites. It almost always produces a great return on their investment and is easy to implement. Many franchise hotels are also boosting their results by using pay-per-click for their own web sites.