Hotel rooms and travel experiences, as a pure product, have a shelf life. If we take the idea that the hotel is a marketplace, then your rooms are perishable daily, and we all know that revenue in the shoulder months is far harder to harvest. So would it be fair to consider your products as FMCG? I think it is worth exploring.
The focus of this is not merely to compare your hotel's inventory to a shelf of ripe avocados which will be unsellable in 24hrs, it is to liken the way we sell hotel experiences to that of the consumer eCommerce landscape.
The eCommerce sector has long realised that successful digital transformation involves investments in infrastructure and modularity. Retailers now understand that merely meeting the next set of customer demands or trend patterns is no longer enough to stay at the top of the tree. Their focus must shift toward matching an infinite game.
In 2018, 82% of all travel bookings around the world took place without human interaction, and with the rate of online bookings growing at 10.3% each year, the eCommerce element of your website is something that you can't ignore. So what can we learn from the consumer eCommerce world to increase direct bookings?
There is enough scope in this subject to write a book, so I will outline four top-level ideas, each of which will be elaborated on in future posts.