Last week, together with some fellow revenue management appassionatos, on a panel at BTO (Buy Tourism Online) in Florence, we had an interesting discussion on the relation between internet and voice reservations. The topic raised was if we are not spending too much time on internet business.

We're on a mission to help you select the best channel manager available for you, let's continue. We have covered a number of general system selection criteria in the last release. Due to the important role of channel management within hotel revenue management, we’ll now have a detailed look at rate management, inventory management and security related matters.  We'll continue from where we stopped last time, with your price strategy.

At Xotels we see a big shift in hotels looking to move to a high quality channel management tool in order to replace some of the tools they are currently working with. Channel management has become an understanding to every hotelier and it is becoming mature. 1000’s of hotels around the world have used channel management tools on a daily basis for years. Step by step the hotel industry is starting to realize that it requires best of breed tools as part of a solid hotel revenue management operation.

Do you know what the conversion % is of your hotel's reservations department? We seem to put a lot of focus on our website conversion statistics, but how many calls are we actually converting in to bookings. Phone sales is a very important direct sales channel for hotels, consumers are making the effort to contact you directly, and should be easy to convert. Why is it though that many hotels have such a poor sales process? Is hotel management not on the ball ?

Yes 2012 will be all about distribution in the hotel industry. There are some major developments that demand attention of hoteliers in order to stay in control of the market mix and distribution cost. Here some of the hot topics of next year: Google Hotel Finder, Meta-Search and Rate Parity, OTA Commission Levels, Direct Sales …