TripConnect – Good for your hotel, too?

TripAdvisor’s service TripConnect is online since last week. It offers the possibility to integrate the website of your hotel into the meta search of TripAdvisor. The aim: Savings commissions on OTA’s due to more bookings on the hotel’s website. Sounds like it would be suitable and an advantage for all hotels, but is this too good to be true?

Let’s have a look at the requirements of TripConnect. At first you have to be subscriber of the Business Listings of TripAdvisor. For all hotels who are not using it until now, pricings can be found via contacting TripAdvisor. Additionally, only hotels whose Internet Booking Engine (IBE) is certified by TripAdvisor can be part of TripConnect. There are currently around 100 certified IBE’s, a hundred more are in the process of certification.

Chances:

Without any doubt, TripConnect is a good way to generate more commission free bookings on your own hotel website. As the worlds largest online review platform it provides you with the widest range. 105 million visitors per month in 2012, 45 million of them via mobile devices.* To take the most out of this opportunity we recommend to optimise the website of your hotel.

Risks

There are some issues concerning the usability of the own IBE. Myhotelshop compared their own IBE with the IBE’s of the OTA’s in July 2013.  Result: Too many mandatory information is requested via the own website, this leads to frustration and in the worst case even to no complementation of booking.

Moreover, you have to consider that your IBE should run on all different types of displays like tablets, smartphones and notebooks. This is called responsive design. Just think about your own way of surfing the internet. How often do you quit pages which are not loading fast or correctly? No one wants to scroll up and down to book a hotel. Keep in mind that there are strong players out there like HRS and booking.com which have optimised websites.

What to consider when joining TripConnect:

• Look for an IBE provider which is expert in responsive design.
• Check the mandatory information that is requested by the Internet Booking Engine. What is really necessary for the booking and what information could be acquired later? “Keep it simple and stupid” like HRS and others do
• After meeting the two conditions above think about registering for TripAdvisor’s Business Listing
• Once connected to TripConnect cap your budget to get a financial overview. Use the internal tracking tool to control your return on investment

Example for acquisition costs via TripConnect

You offer 1€ per click and you need 10 clicks to generate a booking. The room price is set to 89€. Your acquisition costs are therefore 11,23%, which is below the commission cost of common OTA’s.

More information on TripConnect: http://www.tripadvisor.com/TripConnect

*Source: comScore Media Metrix, Worldwide July 2012

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