How to get your hotel's GDS content working harder for your recovery

This blog is part two of our miniseries, focused on helping hoteliers win bookings and maximize revenue throughout recovery. 

Our hotel partners recently told us that, as a technology partner,  the best thing we can do to aid their recovery is to help keep travelers up to date. So we’ve been looking at ways to help you reach both travelers, and the agents that are booking their hotel stays.

We've developed these content best practice guidelines to help you optimize the fields you have at your disposal, and use them as a channel to communicate your safety messages.  This will improve your reach within the entire Travelport demand network throughout recovery — and boost your booking potential.

What should my content highlight right now?

Our research shows that there are two key things your hotel needs to communicate to bookers:

1. the safety measures that are in place at your property

2. your change/cancellation/refund policies if the traveler’s plans change

To stay competitive, secure bookings, and build traveler confidence, it’s vital that travel agents can find and communicate this information during booking. Since safety measures and travel restrictions are constantly changing, agents often need to look at many different sources for the most up-to-date information before making a booking.

So, your hotel should therefore be making it as easy as possible for them to find this information — ideally within their workflow (i.e. on their booking platform).

Here’s some pointers…

Whether it's contactless check-in, enhanced sanitation, or simply more flexible conditions, you can communicate this information to bookers by managing your displayed content. Simply update the fields below using your Central Reservation System (CRS). These fields (shown below) already exist and can be maintained by your team without any need for development. 

Here are some suggested best practice examples:

1. Safety and cleanliness

This example shows how a hotel can easily communicate that safety and cleanliness are a priority, by simply adding text in the predefined fields. It also makes any pertinent safety measures you have in place clear to the agent at the point of sale (in this example, that contactless check-in is available for the traveler).

And here you can see the marketing text field where you can also add relevant safety messaging:

2. Rate rules 

You can also use this text to communicate rate rules, cancellation conditions, and outline flexibility to agents. This way they can reassure travelers at the point of sale that if their plans change, their money is safeguarded.

And if you feel you need a little more airtime, banner ads and sign-on messages can help you to reach agents and keep them up to date on your latest news, offers, and changes. In fact, 68% of agents recall text and graphical marketing messages on search pages — making this a key influence on bookers.

Get your content working harder for your recovery

Agents working to meet additional demands — and with reduced resources  — need access to the information they need within their booking platform. As you can see, it’s quite straightforward to optimize content already on the platform to communicate your safety messages and policy updates without any development required. It’s easy to create new messaging in these fields, and it will really complement your recovery messaging.

Simple, yet very effective.