Study: The President Hotel – using GDS advertising techniques to boost bookings

Maintaining and maximising your hotel properties’ occupancy rates has become increasingly challenging. To effectively sustain and even grow occupancy rates, hotels like The President Hotel Istanbul face and must overcome difficulties with growing competition within ever more saturated or volatile markets, while demonstrating clear return on investment (ROI) for their marketing efforts.

In this blog, we examine how The President Hotel’s latest clever marketing campaign helped them to successfully increase visibility and bookability of rooms and rates on the Travelport Platform and increase share of the rapidly recovering Istanbul tourism market.

The President Hotels Goals:

The President Hotel is one of the top choices for leisure and business travelers to Istanbul’s Old City of Sultan Ahmet. However, The President Hotel and many others like it in certain non-European regions, have seen an impact on occupancy rates at the hands of macro environmental challenges outside their control. Since 2016, the perceived political volatility in neighbouring countries has had a negative effect on tourism numbers and subsequently, the local economy.

Burak Aydin, General Manger at The President Hotel explains how his team successfully increased their visibility through smart targeting of their messages to a qualified audience of travel experts that book thousands of hotels every day. “We recently experienced some challenges in terms of attracting guests from Europe and the US, but we’re starting to see visitor numbers climb again. To accelerate this process of recovery, we need to increase awareness of our brand and our offers. We also need to clearly express the unique benefits of our facilities to both travel agents and leisure and high-yield business travelers around the world.”

Creating an effective and targeted campaign to the right audience, at the right time:

To achieve these goals, and to maximize occupancy and revenues from bookings, The President Hotel engaged the Travelport Digital Media Solutions team to understand the hotel’s goals and challenges. Working with a Travelport digital media specialist, the hotel created a strategic campaign with the most suited digital media solution to promote its rooms and rates on the Travelport Travel Commerce Platform. “We launched a campaign based on Travelport Featured Property from their Digital Media Solutions portfolio,” says Burak.

With 98% of bookings made from the first screen of search results for travel agents*, utilising targeted preferred placement advertising has enabled The President Hotel’s rooms and rates to appear at or near the top of agents’ search screens.

“When an agent searches for a hotel in central Istanbul, our offers appear first, giving us the extra visibility and brand exposure we need,” says Burak. “…helping us to drive revenues from bookings.”

Analysing results and ROI:

By adopting a focused and targeted approach to their marketing and digital advertising campaign, The President Hotel has been able to maximize bookability and achieve higher conversions of $13 ROI for every $1** they invested. As the local tourism market in Istanbul continues to recover, The President Hotel is maximizing its occupancy, with Travelport Featured Property.

“To continue to maximize our occupancy, we need solutions that increase awareness of our brand and offers globally. We are still seeing fewer visitors from Europe and the US, but more travelers are now coming from the Middle East to stay with us – partly thanks to the global reach of the Travelport Travel Commerce Platform,” says Burak. “Featured Property is helping us to maximize occupancy by placing our rooms and rates at the top of agents’ search screens all over the world, increasing our competitive advantage above other hotels and accommodation options in central Istanbul and helping us to maximize our market share with higher conversions from both corporate and leisure bookings.”

 

Click here to download The President Hotel’s case study

*Based on bookings made between Jan-Dec 2017 via Travelport Galileo & Travelport Apollo Desktop points of sale.
**For the period from Feb 2017 to Jan 2018.