The deal, which is the first of its kind, provides the charity with an artificial intelligence powered (AI) booking platform and guest journey expertise all complimentary. This will help support over 59,000 families of children suffering from cancer with temporary housing, transportation, meals and programmatic services.

The partnership deal will enable families, hospital staff, and care providers of this vital service, the ability to reserve and book rooms at the House when they need it at the touch of a button.

According to a recent report from Future Charity, 57% of charity employees feel that new technology not being embraced is one of the biggest hindrances to the sector’s development, but with this partnership, RMH-NY can connect with additional payment providers through their digital booking system to assist with diversifying the organization’s fundraising activities and expand their donation payment methods.

Commenting on the deal, Ruth Browne, President and CEO of Ronald McDonald House New York, said: “Ronald McDonald House New York is both excited and honored to be working with such esteemed organizations.

“We look forward to the advancements that these partnerships will bring to help better serve our families for years to come. As we strive to provide a seamless circle of support for the families we serve, partnerships like these are critical for us to accomplish our mission.”

The charity, which will also be Avvio Inc’s North American designated charity of choice, is located at East 73^rd Street in Manhattan. In close proximity to 16 partnering hospitals, the House features 95 guest rooms, which includes six post-transplant suites.

The partnership has been spearheaded by Avvio Inc.’s U.S. president and advisory board member of Ronald McDonald House New York, Rich Tuckwell-Skuda, who has also introduced guest acquisition platform SiteMinder as part of the deal.

Commenting on the deal, Rich said: “We’re very proud to be working with such an important and worthwhile organisation, which has for so long been part of New York City’s community and is personally very close to my heart. At a time when families are dealing with so much emotional stress, the last thing they need is to have to spend time arranging places to stay and working out how to book space, particularly when many people are travelling from all over the world. This is where we come in, our booking platform is a perfect fit for families to enable them to focus on the care of their loved ones.”

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This collaboration brings together the complementary strengths of Juniper’s comprehensive automated booking engine and Triometric’s proven real-time API analytics platform. Trio is being offered as a value added analytics service to Juniper’s booking environment. This gives travel clients increased visibility into high volumes of complex search data that can be translated into improved revenue opportunities.

Working together, Juniper and Triometric enable existing Juniper customers to smoothly implement the Trio analytics service. Juniper facilitates access to the client’s API traffic at its data centre, while Trio provides the API monitoring and analytics service from its cloud-based analytics platform. Clients who subscribe to this new analytics service benefit from getting fast, scalable and actionable insights into the key pre-configured performance metrics of their operation via dashboards, alerts and reports accessed via a browser.

Using Trio analytics, clients benefit from an easy to use, self-service solution, without the costs or maintenance of traditional business intelligence approaches and without the need for dedicated data analysts. An early adopter of the Trio analytics service is Fastpayhotels, a fast growing and innovative hotel distributor using the Juniper booking platform. As a relative newcomer in a crowded market, Fastpayhotel’s experienced management team recognised that access to key real-time performance metrics is increasingly important as a competitive differentiator. After only a short period, Trio analytics is helping Fastpayhotels business team improve error reporting and identify search and booking patterns that aid inventory planning and customer acquisition.

Established in 1996, Juniper is a leading provider of technology platforms and solutions to the Travel Industry, with over 300 customers in over 40 countries worldwide. The company provides its clients with distribution platforms customized to their requirements, and tools that allow them to automate the processes on the different sales channels. Juniper Booking Engine is the leading distribution technology platform, while Cangooroo Booking Engine is a modular solution designed for tourism intermediaries. Juniper Hub is the connection system for accommodation suppliers.

“Juniper is delighted to be working with Triometric to help bring travel analytics and intelligence to more online travel companies. Triometric brings a wealth of experience, credibility, and strategic thinking that complements our market approach,” said Jaime Sastre, CEO at Juniper Technology.

“We have a lot of synergy with Juniper in terms of the markets that we target and the importance that we place on high quality service delivery and we are delighted with our early success with Fastpayhotels.” Said Matthew Goulden, CEO of Triometric. “We look forward to working with Juniper to bring valuable API intelligence to many more online travel distributors.”

Currently Triometric’s systems process over 3 billion transactions every day. This actionable intelligence enables them to improve their business performance by reducing costs and increasing revenue. The technology is used by some of the largest and most innovative companies engaged in online travel including Hotelbeds, Bonotel and Marriott.

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One of the key learnings shows that mobile first, which has become a universally accepted assumption into the way consumers search and book hotel rooms, is not a universal truth.

This is markedly shown in U.S. guest behavior where 82% of website bookings for four-star hotels in London are made from a desktop device. There has been little change in the past two years and mobile device bookings are still not seeing growth.

However, the same cannot be said when looking at booking patterns of European guests with UK and Irish consumers following the recognized consumer trend for mobile first.

In June 2018 mobile device bookings overtook desktop bookings for Irish guests for the first time and the gap has widened since then with 52% of the domestic bookings for Irish hotels now booked on a mobile device vs. a declining 38% on desktop in the period up to August 2019.

Allora has also provided significant insight into the time it takes guests to book. Geography has again been identified as a major factor when it comes to the length of time from first web visit to the actual booking.

The number of days taken to make a booking at a UK hotel is 3.3 days for a UK-based guest and 2.5 days for a US guest. However, Allora has shown that Ireland-based guests take on average just over 7 days to make a booking in their home country and almost 6 days to make a UK booking. 

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With its latest innovation, venues and hotels using iVvy software can now set their own rules and show their meeting space, and food and beverage availability to specific event planners and booker types (such as corporate planners or travel agents) logged into the iVvy system. This streamlines the lower value meeting bookings that may otherwise be a burden to fulfill. This also means more control for the booker, as they can now compare rooms and decide which room to host their meeting from, depending on its availability and price.

Online booking is on the rise for the meetings space and meetings themselves are trending towards smaller, less complicated events,”  explains Lauren Hall, CEO of iVvy. “Venue spaces now recognize that small meetings can make for big business. However, much like larger meetings, planners expect a fast turn around and attentive service regardless of the size of the meeting. We know from client feedback that hoteliers and venue operators are seeking out digital tools to optimize their smaller events and spaces to free up staff to focus on higher-value engagements. Our new meeting booking tool is designed to simplify the meeting booking process while driving conversions and profitability for the venue operator.”

iVvy offers meeting planners the ability to search, compare, book and pay for function space, catering and group accommodations online, 24/7. By providing conference centers, hotels, restaurants and cruise lines with an integrated revenue management and distribution platform, iVvy equips Hotel Operators with the tools they need to manage inquiries on any device, anywhere. With enhanced reporting and analytics, Hotels are provided with greater visibility over their business so they can yield their group rooms, meetings & event spaces to maximize revenue.

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The company’s GroupSync platform is essentially a search engine that uses matching algorithms to place thousands of events at the right venue, saving planners time and money. Using GroupSync, planners can search over 170,000 properties in 225 countries.

Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Groups360 was launched in 2014 by two executives formerly of Gaylord Entertainment (now Ryman Hospitality Properties). The executives found themselves out of a job after the Gaylord Hotels brand was acquired by Marriott International. That’s when they put on their entrepreneurial hats.

The idea behind the startup was to help meeting planners more efficiently cut through the tens of thousands of choices of meeting and convention spaces that may or may not be a good fit. Instead of searching by destination, they reasoned that meeting planners should be able to search based on criteria related to their actual needs. Location of the venue should be secondary. The technology was designed to filter options, offering locations they likely would not have otherwise even considered.

The concept took off quickly. Within two years of launching, Groups360 had booked more than $100 million in revenue for hotels, with an average meeting size of 400 and an event cost of $100,000. The solution had reduced the time to book a space to about 24 days on average, which was about one third of the industry average.

Since then, the marketplace has grown by orders of magnitude, the features and benefits have continued improved, and the technology has become increasingly sophisticated. With the GroupSync Proposal Comparison Tool, for example, meeting planners can now automatically transfer RFP responses into a spreadsheet for comparison. All responses are aggregated into one, easy-to-view table that can be sorted based on the planner’s specifications, allowing for apples-to-apples comparisons.

Meeting planners can source venues and locations that fit direct needs like pricing, dates, weather, location, amenities, and more. As responses to RFPs come in, they  can compare their options directly within the application based on the specifications outlined while creating their RFPs, saving them a significant amount of time. Rather than needing to generate a new table or PDF any time an RFP response comes in, the GroupSync Proposal Comparison Tool automatically updates results.

The investment funds from Accor, Hilton, IHG and Marriott International will reportedly be used to further enhance the GroupSync platform. Groups360 expects to deliver access to group rooms and space availability, pricing and an “instant book” capability for less-complex meetings as part of its future product roadmap. This functionality, along with other unique features, will ensure ease of use and meaningfully reduce friction for meeting and event planners.

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Jan was asked about his views on effective metasearch management, the growth of Google, and some classic meta mistakes hotels make.

How valuable is metasearch to Deutsche Hospitality?

Its value is very high. At Deutsche Hospitality, we see that metasearch conversion rates are among the highest of our channels. Today, meta is one of the most effective online marketing mechanisms for generating direct bookings.

With that in mind, how much of their budget should hotels allocate to metasearch?

Practically, there should be no limit to the absolute value of your budget. More importantly, you should continue to spend it as long as you generate a satisfactory ROAS. Or, the inverse of that, the Cost of Sale (COS). For example, if a COS of anything below 14% is acceptable for your hotel, you should spend as much budget as you can on metasearch without exceeding this prohibitive level.

What’s more effective: managing metasearch bids in-house or using a partner?

There are some positives to managing meta auctions in-house. For example, you could respond quicker to rapidly-changing bids than a traditional agency that normally does weekly or monthly bid adjustments. Having knowledge about the meta set-up and management can also mean less dependence on agencies in terms of possible cost-saving, given that your personnel costs are lower than the agency fees.

To be successful on meta, you need the right talent – and it is hard to find. Metasearch management done correctly can also be extremely time-consuming. This time could be invested elsewhere with higher returns, so you need to calculate the opportunity cost of having a meta manager in your hotel vs using a partner’s services.

For hoteliers, the appeal of working with tech partners is that they can ‘set it and forget it’. Of course, it can be easier to keep an eye on your hotel’s results on metasearch without having to go through the nuts and bolts of bid management.

What is the impact of a passive approach to meta bidding (no participation)?

It’s simple: not participating in meta auctions means missing out on direct bookings. Even if bidding can be pricey, meta-allocated bookings can still cost you less than bookings through OTAs.

A passive approach is equal to leaving money on the table, which OTAs will grab.

Is Google the right metasearch channel for everyone?

I believe that Google will continue to dominate the market. So, yes, right now it is the right distribution channel for every hotel – but only under the condition that Google is the dominant search engine in your hotel’s respective region.

But don’t forget about local metasearch sites – if they are popular amongst your guests, you should be adding them to your distribution mix. The distribution budget should then be allocated based on the ROAS generated on these sites.

How much budget should hotels allocate to metasearch?

Practically, there should be no limit to the absolute value of your budget. More importantly, you should continue to spend it as long as you generate a satisfactory ROAS. Or, the inverse of that, the Cost of Sale (COS). For example, if a COS of anything below 14% is acceptable for your hotel, you should spend as much budget as you can on metasearch without exceeding this prohibitive level.

How do you measure success on meta?

At Deutsche Hospitality, we apply the metrics of ROAS/COS to each meta channel and see whether it fits into the overall COS for any particular hotel’s direct booking revenue.

What are the biggest meta mistakes a hotel can make?

Not having your rates in check! Without rate parity, you better stay away from metasearch. Also, I see some hotels being passive at managing their bids on metasearch, therefore not fully exploiting their revenue potential for this number-one distribution channel or wasting money on clicks that cannot convert!

To find out more about how to build a bidding strategy that marries high volume with high return, join Jan for a webinar on August 28 at 4pm BST. Click here to learn more and to register.

Alisa Voitika is Brand and Content Manager at Triptease.

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Significantly, many accept that there’s enough pie to go around and that the accommodations industry has more than enough customers to feed both traditional hotels as well as home sharing platforms. Are we all certain of this, though? If you were a hotel developer, would you bet tens of millions of dollars on this being true?

My take on this is that when the economy is healthy, indeed there’s plenty to feed all accommodations of all tiers and classifications. But when the next recession inevitably hits, you had better be prepared.

While there are numerous improvements you can make to your operations to help insulate your hotel from any potential disasters, for today’s purposes, let’s focus on your top-of-funnel marketing tools, more specifically the booking engine which is critical to get guests to experience your brand in full to thereby make the best monetary decision with you.

Not only does booking direct mean no cuts given to external channels, but it can also allow you to upsell, upgrade and package to thereby capture the most possible revenue from each customer.

This is critical nowadays because each incremental spend will ensure a better experience for the guest and an increased likeliness of positive word of mouth and loyalty – two near-priceless qualities to have when demand dips. Aside from any rich media that you add to your booking engine to give it a visual storytelling makeover, let’s examine some of the inner workings of packaging, upgrading to suites and selecting an individual rooms to see how they can help your top line.

Packaging Is Your Best Friend

While most of your guestrooms won’t be able to compete with home sharing in terms of providing apartments with full kitchens embedded in neighborhoods not zoned for short-term rentals, a core advantage for hotels is that we have staff. Yes, we have people who excel at service delivery and ensuring that guests’ needs are handled for them.

So, while your lower tier double queen may look somewhat boring when compared against a newly remodeled loft on Airbnb Plus, where you can fight back is through offering guests fantastic deals for add-on services, amenities or activities to make their time with you exceptional. Free breakfast is perhaps the simplest of these, but you can expand this out to include a full gourmet getaway, spa vouchers, in-room arrival gifts, VIP access or offsite experiences through third parties.

The key here is often that your user interface is cluttered and cumbersome, so your add-ons can’t be fully appreciated nor is the true value being conveyed. To this latter point, for guests to properly window shop and be enticed by your bundles, they need to be shown how much they are saving.

Again, modern booking software can come to the rescue by resuscitating the look and feel of your reservation portal so that users don’t get a headache squinting to read all the details and so they can actually have some fun browsing through all the options you’ve built into the system. An important caveat here is that in order for you to amp up your booking engine with lots of packages and extras, you have to first create those extras – a task that’s far more encompassing than just revenue management.

Select And Upgrade

Where I foresee booking engines making big gains in the coming year is both in their ability to effectively convince customers into upgrading their initial purchases so you can better fill your premium tier product as well as in facilitating individual room selections (for an incremental fee if you so desire) under the guise of an attribute-based sales (ABS) model.

Coupled with your excellent service, your suites and villas will undoubtedly give guests a far better experience over some alternate lodging. But what’s lacking is an effective means by which to tell your inventory’s story via ABS. Sometimes for this we’re just as guilty as the OTAs by displaying our cheapest rooms at the top of the search results page, subconsciously priming customers to select exactly those and not consider much else.

To remedy this, you might try reorienting how product tiers are organized during an inquiry or look for alternate ways to get guests interested in your suites. To better understand what simple initiatives you can take, look no further than companies like Nor1, which has a myriad of solutions designed to, for instance, give you better guest intelligence or increase merchandising sales at check-in.

Another great way to go about this is by letting guests book a standard room, and then sending them an invitation to virtually tour your suites via a confirmation email, either immediately after booking or in the days afterwards. Even though this is a staple of the airline industry, it is still an emergent niche for hotels, with companies like Koridor able to manage these follow-up correspondences via private portals that let guests view then select individual rooms or upgrade to something fancier.

To circumvent any PMS integration issues, you might also recruit your email marketing providers to send out these prearrival messages to inform guests about the wealth of other possibilities that go above and beyond your cheapest room. These can always be connected to private landing pages on your website or direct guests to call a hotline to let your reservations team do the upselling.

One of the world’s most published writers in hospitality, Larry Mogelonsky is the principal of Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice. His experience encompasses hotel properties around the world, both branded and independent, and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Larry is also on several boards for companies focused on hotel technology. His work includes five books, “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012), “Llamas Rule” (2013), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Llama is Inn” (2017) and “The Hotel Mogel” (2018). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business challenges or to book speaking.

This article may not be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.

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Solving for growing buyer demand and content fragmentation, Sabre Content Services for Lodging is designed to provide access to more options and a more consistent shopping experience to include the way content is displayed at the room and rate level. Sabre’s API-driven solution will deliver more efficiency and revenue with increased lodging choice, as well as improved capabilities to better manage preferred content. Travel agencies have full flexibility to choose the aggregator content they would like to access.

Driving the development of the solution is Sabre’s focus on “normalizing and structuring the shopping response” – in other words, making it easier for agents to comparison shop lodging options. To be sure, this has been a challenge for the industry.

In a usability study, Sabre found that product normalization helped agents reach a booking decision 30 percent faster. Another key benefit is that all bookings, even those through an aggregator, will be active GDS segments, making it easier for travel agents to service bookings.

The new API capabilities will be incorporated across all Sabre points of sale including Sabre Red 360 and GetThere. Additional API enhancements will be added to Content Services for Lodging over the next year. Sabre first announced the development of Sabre Content Services for Lodging, described as a technology solution that will integrate multiple sources of content including the Sabre global distribution system (GDS) and non-GDS sources such as aggregators, re-distributors, agency-sourced hotel content and other sources, in September 2017.

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Not only does this technology increase time and engagement spent on hotel websites–as guests explore the look and feel of each room–but it radically increases their exposure and rankings on search engines. Now, through a partnership with technology solution provider startup VDroom, virtual reality has become a critical component of GCH marketing efforts.

Through the VDroom platform, property owners create and distribute a 3D gallery of visual assets with one click. The technology proactively reports to search engines rather than passively waiting for them to index a new listing, further increasing visibility and direct traffic to a property. Hotels using the service have enjoyed up to 50% more views than hotels using regular images. The technology also allows hotels to upsell–offering an upgrade to a client who just booked a standard room by linking to a deluxe room, and demonstrating the difference.

According to Daniel Wishnia, GCH digital marketing consultant, the “wow” effect from virtual reality offers incentive for guests to book directly through the hotel as opposed to using an OTA. This is critical for hotels that commonly pay up to 30% commission to OTA’s to serve as their booking agents.

Furthermore, innovations in the field mean the 360 viewing now can be accessed through smartphones or PCs without the need for special equipment or glasses, Rather than a trend, GCH sees virtual reality as a proven strategy to increase hotel bookings.

Michal Hubschmann is CEO of VDroom, a leading 360°/Virtual Reality content management system for hotels to showcase 3D versions of their properties.

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With hotel competition getting stiffer, ADR pressure, the rise of alternate accommodation and channel chaos, hotels are under constant pressure of managing their availability and rates, competition, uncovering demand and distributing their inventory on the channels that are most profitable.

By leveraging AI/ML technology, Smart Distribution enables hotels to understand and optimize source markets and channels, benchmark with similar hotels and automate and innovate in terms of self-service and advanced room mapping. This will free hoteliers to adopt a proactive operational strategy rather than being reactive and operate with a ‘test and see’ model.

Some of the innovative features offered under Smart Distribution include:

Channel Discovery: Discover new demand and source markets and seamlessly contract with new channels to unlock new revenue streams based on true market intelligence. Benchmark your KPIs like ADR, Room nights, LOS from transient business. Compare yourself to similar anonymized hotels and your performance last year based on aggregated data.

Auto-Mapping: Automatically map room and rate combinations for your property with mapping recommender and reduce time to market to fractions of the current time and effort.

As an end-to-end solution, Smart Distribution offers hoteliers the industry’s largest ecosystem of demand channels and enables hoteliers to make intelligent and informed distribution decisions with AI-powered recommendations based on their unique property. Going live on these channels and welcoming new guests have never been easier with drastically reduced contracting and implementation times.

With 1,25,000+ properties on board and over 1,000 channels connected including OTAs, GDSs, Tour Operators and TMCs, RateGain is a leader in the hospitality distribution landscape. The distribution solutions consisting of RezGain channel management and DHISCO Switch enables the hospitality distribution across all continents from independent hotel groups to all major hotel chains.

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