Hotelchamp’s informative messaging through the roof — hotels are using website notifications to update their guests and potential guests about the Coronavirus

Busy times at Hotelchamp HQ, with many hotels wanting to use informative messaging on their website to keep their guests and potential guests up-to-date in regards to the Coronavirus. Since these updates can change every day, hotels are looking for an easy and flexible way to communicate the latest COVID-19 updates at the hotel.

A demand shock in the travel industry can come from many sources; a financial crisis, health crisis, or political crisis. And as the term suggests, they often can’t be predicted. The initial results can be devastating, and quickly hoteliers will try to reduce the negative impact of the lower demand. Still, while needing to make these decisions, hoteliers will be facing uncertainty and unknowns. We’ve taken a look at what’s happened in the past, and what hoteliers can learn from these previous demand shocks.

The Coronavirus is causing uncertainty in the travel industry. With many unknowns and travellers being more cautious, hotels are already experiencing the negative effects. The reluctance to travel has seen occupancy rates drop dramatically. When situations like this occur, it’s understandable that hoteliers feel the need to take drastic action, with many dropping rates to try and encourage travellers to book. However, this isn’t the only option.

We put together our top four points to consider during the current crisis:

1.

The news of the ITB Berlin 2020’s cancellation was a shock to the travel industry last Friday. As to be expected, the announcement hit many people hard, with thousands of people all around the world preparing to take part in one of the biggest global travel trade shows.

With over 10,000 exhibitors due to take part and over 100,000 trade visitors coming to Berlin, the ripple effect of the late cancellation will be felt throughout Berlin over the coming weeks.

Are “Bleisure” travellers an untapped opportunity for your hotel? Learn about Bleisure travellers, and whether there’s an opportunity for your venue.

What is a Bleisure traveller?

There’s a popular phrase that’s making the rounds that you might have heard: “Bleisure travellers”. Bleisure travellers are business travellers who have either combined or extended their trip for leisure purposes. Often meaning that they’ve added a couple of extra days for leisure at either the beginning or the end of their stay.

In October 2019, an important privacy law changed as an update to Europe’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). This change also effects every hotel website in Europe. The biggest change is that website visitors now have to actively give consent by ticking boxes – those boxes can not be pre-ticked anymore. 

What is the problem, you ask yourself? The problem is bigger than you might think. Research shows that on average only around 10% of visitors give active consent if you ask them to tick all 3 of the most common cookie boxes (Preferences,

Is Retina wrecking your brand?

Retina Displays

Autumn 2018 marked a watershed in screen technology as the Macbook Air upgraded to a Retina display. This followed a similar shift by the Macbook Pro years earlier to Retina, and represents a broader shift to higher definition displays for newer computers. Unknown to hoteliers, their prime digital content began appearing blurry and stretched to their website visitors. 

What is Retina?

Many hotels fail to tailor their websites according to season, instead choosing to keep the same design and offers for the whole year. But every season has its own dynamics, and if you aim to increase your direct bookings, there are certain topics which are nice to cover on your website.
Here are three ways to optimise your website and get it ready for summer…

Messaging

Start updating your website by highlighting your summer-related facilities.

Introducing new Booking Window Targeting

Hotelchamp now provides handy booking window targeting options. These options make it easy to automatically trigger offers or campaigns to guests searching for dates a particular number of days in advance. You can now define specific booking windows based on whether the guest’s searched dates are greater than, less than, or equal to a specific number of days in the future.

These options can also be combined with specific date targeting,

Geo-targeted offers and rate disparity, and who makes the final decision when revenue management and marketing teams work together: these are just two of the issues we didn’t have time to discuss in our cram-packed webinar a few weeks ago. But we address these points – and more – in this short follow-up article.

Now available on demand, the webinar in question was Creating the Ultimate Couple: how to bring together marketing and revenue management teams,