Last Room Availability

Have you heard of the term ‘Last Room Availability’?

How does that benefit me? Well the simple answer is more online bookings.

To achieve this you should have your property management system connected to your channel manager. The concept is that if you have a room available tonight, it is put online for sale. As soon as it is sold, whether it be through an online channel or a walkin, your channel manager is updated with that latest availability straight away. An added benefit is that you don’t have to manage your allotments on a daily basis, you simply have your availability updated online.

Don’t panic, some systems allow you to hold back rooms to have that buffer if you feel you need it but this can still result in not selling all your available rooms. If those last few apartments aren’t available online then you may miss out on sales at peak times.

By manually updating and only having a handful of allotments online rather than them all, you then run the risk of losing sales. If you sell out on a given room type and haven't had the chance to top it up that sale could go to your competitor. As managers, I know you are all very busy, there are times when you might get caught up and don’t update your channel manager for a couple of days. Lost sales means lost bookings for your owners.

Maximise your exposure by putting online as many rooms as possible for all your room types.

Important Tip: Room Linking:

Ensure that you link your rooms together so that your availability is spread over your similar room types.  This way instead of putting 1 room on your 1 Bedroom 3 night, 1 room on your 1 Bedroom 5 night and 1 Bedroom 7 night, you can put 3 on each of the room types. When one of them sells then the other 2 room types drop to 2 rooms. Once again this is maximising your exposure and can result in more sales.

The eTourism Online reservations system connects with most of the industries leading channel managers including Ezychannel, HiSite, Siteminder, Levart, Resonline & Update 247.

Talk to eTourism today about how to ensure you are maximising your exposure and putting as many rooms online for sale as possible.