What is the meaning / definition of Direct Sales?

The term Direct Sales refers to the revenue generated in the key Hotel Market Segments using a Direct channel : official hotel website, phone, email, livechat or messaging solutions… which does not entail the payment of any fees or commissions to a Travel Agency.

Driving Direct sales is essential for anyone in hotel management to cut down on commissions from other channels, such as OTAs, and increase profit of a property.
Understanding your direct sales is essential in effort to reach the full revenue potential of your hotel.
This can be achieved by classifying consumers according to their inherent & common characteristics or their needs and wants, which is essential for generating a marketing strategy, as it allows the definition of a potential target market. Through knowing the target market a hospitality company can customise its services and products more precisely to meet the target’s preferences.

For marketing purposes it is customary to group the people making up the target market into several segments according to their inherent and common characteristics such as personality, interests, age, gender, income, occupation, geographical location etc. In the past Marketeers had commonly focussed on demographic segments such as age, gender income, occupation and geographic location. As Marketing has become more customer centric, Marketeers now tend to consider psychographic characteristics such as shared personality traits, beliefs, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles and other factors as well, when classifying their market segments.

But beware, market segmentation may limit the business’s approach towards identifying and interacting with target consumers.

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