Reservation Assistance Q&A

Q: What is Reservation Assistance?

A: Reservation assistance is a new service provided by OpenBook in which highly trained reservation specialists are ready to receive calls 24/7 from travelers who need assistance in booking a reservation online. A toll free number is provided to each participating property and can either be placed on the property website, booking tool or property managers can simply have calls forwarded to the number when the front desk is busy or unavailable. A live chat link can also be provided for placement on the property website or booking tool.

Q: Why did OpenBook choose to start offering Reservation Assistance?

A: OpenBook is constantly trying to improve the rate of online booking for our customers. A 2009 study showed that the average shopping cart abandonment rate is currently around 60% - 70% for most properties. Excuses for leaving the booking tool without making a reservation included: Couldn’t find customer support (22%) and Security concerns with booking over the internet (21%). Reservation Assistance was created as a solution to these excuses. With Reservation Assistance travelers can have their concerns about security eliminated because they can book with a friendly, confident specialist, and can receive 24/7 customer support while booking—all without creating more work for the front desk.

Q: How will Reservation Assistance affect my property?

A: By letting our professional 24/7 Reservation Assistance Specialists answer a portion of your property phone calls, you as a property manager can maintain fewer front desk employees and free the rest of them up to attend to the needs of the customers at the property. We also understand that many properties, due to financial reasons, choose to decrease their front desk hours during their slow season—Reservation Assistance is the solution. Post our toll free phone number and live chat link on your website or booking tool, or just forward your phones when you are unavailable—then sit back and relax.

Q: Can I trust those who will be answering the phones to treat my travelers well?

A: Yes. Trained 24/7 Reservation Assistance Specialists are those who will be answering the phone. These aren’t just call center employees, all specialists have been trained in proper phone etiquette and have extensive customer service experience. They are also specialized with hospitality backgrounds and in helping guests complete their bookings. Specialists pride themselves in their knowledge about each property.

Q: Does OpenBook have the information about my property and services?

A: The first thing that happens when a property begins Reservation Assistance is extensive research on OpenBook’s side to obtain detailed information about the property policies, the amenities, the rooms, events, attractions and specials. OpenBook has a state of the art database that displays the information quickly and concisely to our specialist so that the traveler will never know the difference between the front desk and OpenBook. Reservation Assistance Specialists also frequently contact the property to make sure that all of the information on file is completely updated and correct. It’s an ongoing, rewarding process.

Q: Who should I contact if I want to learn more?

A: If you would like to learn more please contact the OpenBook corporate office at 1-866-342-6099 or click here.

January Revenue Tip: Ramp Up Marketing

February is when reservations start picking up for properties. Guests start looking online and booking summer vacations ahead of time. In 2009 more than 60% of all leisure travelers booked online, and of that 60%, 74% of online bookings come from the direct hotel websites. That means on average 60% of all of hotel revenues and business came from online bookings - Do your numbers look like that? If not, something is wrong. Promote your website as much as you can so guests can find your website quickly and easily and you too can increase your overall bookings.

Here are some tips of things you can do now to increase your bookings for the coming months:

• Start a marketing budget or increase your current marketing budget for your busier months so you can be found easier online by guests searching.
• Put summer pictures on your website of fun activities and events in the area.
• Put summer content on your website. Talk about all of the activities and events during the summer time and how close they are to your property.
• Get lists of events this summer in your area and dates to our marketing department so we can proactively market them.
• Focus on your marketing and advertising. What else can you do to help promote your website? Put your website address on all your business cards, flyers, and advertisements. Tell your guests you have a website. The more people who visit your website, the higher search engines will list your hotel in search results so others can find you easier.
• Offer summer promotions and discounts online and promote them. If you offer a discount at the hotel, it should be offered online as well. Many guests prefer to book online and will not call.
• Manage your own Trip Advisor account. Trip Advisor is where previous guests can go review your website online and where new travelers look to see how well others enjoyed staying at your property. Respond to their reviews. If there is a negative review, respond to it and apologize or state how that problem has been fixed. Add photos and descriptions of your property. Ask guests leaving to review your website on Trip Advisor. If you have good reviews, place a trip advisor badge on your website so others go look at them.
• List your website address on as many other websites as possible. Call other local businesses in town and make agreements with them that if they will talk about your property on their website and link to your website that you will talk about theirs.

The bottom line is this – now is the time to focus heavily on your marketing and advertising. Do all that you can do and let us help you with it. Increase your marketing budget or give our marketing department ideas of what else can be done and we will happily do it for you.

For more information and for help generating ideas of how to market your property better please contact OpenBook’s marketing department at 208-624-0374.

Let’s work together to increase your online reservations this summer!

December Revenue Tip: Offer Promotions and Packages Online

Now is the time of year that customers start bargain hunting online for discounted vacations. By offering promotions and packages, customers feel like they have just found “a killer of a deal” that they cannot resist. This helps increase conversions by enticing customers to book immediately.

Without discounts and packages prevalently showing on your booking tool, you are at a huge disadvantage from other properties. Offering a simple discount can surprisingly boost the number of bookings you get.

Common promotions offered by lodging properties include “Stay X number of nights and get X% off your total balance”, “Stay any day Monday through Thursday and get X% off your total balance”, and “Stay 6 days and get the 7th day free or ½ off”. Many hotels also offer AAA, AARP, military, and government discounts online. Offer larger discounts on days that your hotel is less busy.
Packages work best if you partner up with local businesses to offer discounted tickets for events and activities in town. For example, if you live by a ski resort you can have packages like “Stay 2 weekday nights and get a ski lift ticket for only X dollars.”

The OpenBook booking tool has the functionality to offer promotions and packages online through a promotion code box or through simple check boxes shown to the customer when selecting a room. These features bring in new customers and customers that wouldn’t have booked without the discount.

Once you have decided on the promotions and packages you want to use online, it is important to proactively promote these discounts. You can do this by posting your discounts on bargain hunting websites or by sending out a broadcast email campaign to the previous guests that have stayed with you to try to get them to come again. If you are interested in developing a promotion or would like OpenBook to send an email campaign for you, please contact CarolAnn Buck at carolann.buck@yellowstonehs.com or 208-624-0374.

October Revenue Tip: How to Winterize Your Website

By Kelly Horner

Have you “winterized” your website yet?  Below are some essential winter changes to make to your hotel property website.

• Adjust the writing to match winter activities and themes with helpful local information for travelers
• Replace current photos with ones that showcase activities and your hotel in winter
• Include winter events in your calendar and links menu

Most travelers center their search online first around vacation activities before searching for specific lodging—which is why each OpenBook website has a page dedicated to activities and attractions – ensuring that your site will show up when travelers search for fun things to do in your area. The idea is that they’ll first arrive at your site for information on activities, and then move onto conveniently booking a room.

How about an example? Say Bob Samuels is on Google searching for “snowmobiling Sun Valley, ID” and the search engine brings up your website because you’ve specifically featured content about Sun Valley snowmobiling vacations on your activities page. Bob clicks on the link to your site and books rooms for a three day weekend of snowmobiling. Without this “winterized” content, Bob ends up pulling into your competitor’s parking lot down the street.

To make your website seasonally appealing to search engines and visitors right away, contact the Web Department at OpenBook to begin making changes at 208-624-0374.

De-mystifying Pay-Per-Click Advertising

By Matthew Sanders

In ten short years the hospitality industry has completely changed, and the pace is picking up. Previously, hotels worried about three booking channels: travel agents, walk-ins (sometimes guided by billboards and chambers of commerce), and word-of-mouth.  Today, internet sales channels dominate, with more than 70% of travelers starting their travel planning online. Most hotel owners are mesmerized by the pace of change and wonder what to do to keep up.

Before we get to the suggestions, let’s orient ourselves a bit. About a decade ago online travel agents like Orbitz and Travelocity came on the scene as the first wave, effectively carving big chunks of business away from traditional travel agents. Then smaller, specialized travel portals emerged and linked with traveler feedback sites like Tripadvisor to capture a larger share of the word-of-mouth driven customers.

The latest, and most important wave of change is currently upon us -- direct-to-consumer marketing. In order to succeed today, hotels have to develop an entirely new strategy of putting themselves front and center on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. One key way to get at the top of traveler hotel searches is to develop a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising campaign.

PPC Advertising is a method developed by search engines to deliver “sponsored links” or small paid advertisements on the top and side bars of searches, for a small fee. Here’s how it all works:

1. Consumers submit billions of key word searches each day, giving search engines a lot of information on specific audiences from their search and clicking behavior.
2. Search engines provide space in the upper and right hand sides of their pages for advertising connected with specific key word searches. For instance, in a recent search for “Lake Tahoe” in Google, “Harrah’s Lake Tahoe” showed up on the top of the list to the right.
3. Advertisers obtain these advertising spaces by bidding on specific key words and phrases, and pay for only the clicks consumers make to the company’s website, hence Pay-per-click advertising.

Some major advantages of PPC campaigns include:

• Fast. A PPC ad campaign can be developed in a matter of days, with almost immediate results.
• Cost-effective. By using specific key phrases, advertisements reach only targeted customers, thus optimizing each penny spent on advertising.
• Measurable. All PPC campaigns can be tracked to the smallest detail ensuring online advertisers make the most from their heir money.

A PPC advertising campaign is vital for hotels to capture today’s scarce travelers combing the internet for lodging in your area. Online advertising is most successful when combined with a winning website designed to convert travelers into customers. The impact of such direct-to-consumer marketing is obvious – with OpenBook managed campaigns yielding more than 10 times the booking revenue on every dollar spent on PPC advertising.

To learn more about OpenBook Pay Per Click and other marketing services go to www.openbookit.com or call 866-342-6099.

Pay Per Click Made Easy

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Focus on Customers not Technology: How to get back to business with the right partnerships

By Matthew Sanders
President, OpenBook

After 18 years of building a motorcycle dealer management and marketing system currently in use by 80 percent of the industry, Zack Paul was eager for something new. He had hoped by moving from Cleveland and buying a resort on the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park, his business would easily capture a small slice of the 3 million annual visitors to the area, and he could simplify his life and get back to the outdoor sports he loved so much – skiing, motorcycling, and snowmobiling. But he quickly discovered his new hotel business had familiar management and marketing problems he had become so custom to throughout his career.

So Zack did what he’d been doing for years, he called his former Lightspeed colleague and techno-wizard Dudley Chapman to describe his plight. Borrowing from previous experience, they attacked the problem with three key business principles in mind.

1) You don’t create demand, you satisfy it. Most business owners worry excessively about what they cannot control. Hoteliers can’t control vacation timing preferences any more than automakers can control the whether someone wants a convertible or SUV. They must instead find ways to satisfy demand trends better than their competitors. In the hospitality industry, hotels don’t compete with the Marriott on Wall Street, they compete with the guy down their street. The key is to find where the demand is coming from, and ensure that your business’ value (location, quality, surroundings, amenities, services, etc.) is communicated so clearly that you satisfy customers’ decision-making needs.

2) Get technology out of your way. Since the advent of the internet, the businesses have been battered by waves of new technologies with funny sounding acronyms like XML and SOAP, strange monikers like “always-on” and “fully-integrated”, and names like “Twitter” and “Google”. But business owners shouldn’t have to spin to the tune of new offerings, and spend time and money only to end up dazed and disappointed. Today, business owners should be able to focus more on their core business, serving their customers, and delegate systems development and uptime to a technology company. After all, you never think a utility company’s power transfer station when you flip the lights on when you walk into a room. No, you simply pay the bill for what you use, and focus on other things, like relaxing after a hard day.

3) Cash is always king. With market volatility a norm in every industry, business owners must become cash hoarders, and look at new investments and systems with an increasingly steely eye. As credit and operating lines become more difficult to come by or manage, the prevailing ethic should be, “what have you done for me lately?” or “how quickly is this new venture paying off?” As above, any new technology should have as little impact on existing cash as possible. Why? Because business owners shouldn’t be technology owners, but rather users of technology services. Heavy, cash-draining up front software and service costs should be looked upon with skepticism and performance-based, service-oriented pricing should be paramount in order to conserve cash reserves.

Drawing on these principles, Paul and Chapman spent nights and weekends trying to assemble the best solution for Zack’s independent hotel/resort. They canvassed the market for just the right mix of technology and marketing services, but came away with their heads spinning from huge array of property management software, marketing consultants, website designers, online distributors like Orbitz, and franchise offerings they encountered. They quickly discovered that none of these offerings delivered the all-in-one solution that allowed Zack satisfy demand better with a cost-effective technology service. No, instead they ended up with a pile of different systems in front of them that didn’t communicate with each other and cost way, way too much for an independent operator.

Undaunted, they began to build OpenBook to satisfy both Zack’s needs and the demand of other similar wanting to focus on business and not spend money and time on subpar solutions property owners. After many changes to the software based on client demand for features and services, here’s what OpenBook offers today:

• World class web presence. Clients receive guidance or service in building a website that satisfies the today’s customer demands for ease-of-use and transaction.
• Aggressive online marketing services. The top search engines receive more than 6 billion searches per month, with more than 70% of travelers looking for hotel rooms looking first on the internet. OpenBook’s web marketing team aggressively markets client hotels online so they capture a greater share of bookings from travelers planning trips to their area.
• Security encrypted real-time online booking. Customers are accustomed to buying things online, and become skeptical if the process is too complicated or lacks comforting security measures.
• Intuitive property management. Each online booking immediately blocks rooms in the OpenBook software on the front desk computer. We have heard from users with little computer training that the system is very easy to use, and makes over-booking and night audit headaches evaporate.
• Cost-effective. With a small startup fee, clients get up and running quickly and pay only a small success fee from bookings generated by OpenBook.
• Fully Integrated. Using cutting edge technology and a wealth of experience, OpenBook is fully-integrated so owners can keep track of their customers from the moment they search to the minute their head hits the pillow.

The OpenBook way is enjoying great success among their clients, now 135 strong. In 2008, OpenBook clients fared much better than the overall market, with several reporting up to 40% revenue growth over 2007.  Many of these owners not only report increased income, but also reduction of heartburn! As usual, Zack and Dudley have many other things they’re adding to help clients simplify their business buying group that will deliver cost-savings to clients, and a direct connection to Expedia.

Zack recently remarked how pleased he is that clients find life more peaceful because OpenBook puts them back in control of their business. Like his experience at Lightspeed, he’s once again helped clients, “get technology out of the way so they can get back to helping customers have a wonderful experience!”