411 On Travel Tripper - Things You Must Know

Marketing and Design Tips For Vacation Rentals – A Word from the Experts

Looking to booast your vacation rental marketing and get some tips from the experts? Want to design a website and brand that gets results? We recently became aware of Travel Tripper, we were so impressed by their pitch that we asked Ben Hanley from TT some questions to feature on our Boostly Blog.

1. Sum up Travel Tripper in one sentence.

Travel Tripper is a full-service distribution and marketing partner helping hotels worldwide to generate demand, optimise conversions, and maximise revenue.

2. How did it get started, why did it start, and when did it start?

Travel Tripper started in 2005 with a simple question: how can we help hotels get more direct bookings? At the time (and, in fact, this trend has continued to this day), OTAs were capturing a larger and larger share of hotel bookings. Hotels were stuck paying enormous commission fees. One of the problems we noticed was that the software small hospitality businesses were using to capture bookings seemed outdated. Compared to the OTAs, customers had a poor user experience booking directly at small hotels.

So we decided to build a better booking engine and central reservation system. That became our first incarnation, RezTrip. Over the last eleven years, we've evolved, adding additional products and services, including a hotel website platform, website design and development and digital marketing.

Our motto is “Be Direct”, which still drives our company philosophy today. All of our products and services are geared toward helping hotels increase profitability by prioritising and strengthening their direct booking channel. We’re really focused on helping hotels of all sizes take back bookings from the OTAs!

3. What differentiates Travel Tripper from Free-To-Book, Evivo, Little Hotelier, and other Online booking systems?

Travel Tripper heavily emphasises innovation. We are constantly evolving and growing our product to meet the demands of a fast-changing online travel market. Our company offers many incredible features that help hotel managers better merchandise and market their boutique hotels online. To name just a few:

  • Geographic pricing in our CRS. Hotels can set special rates based on geography, including continent, country, city, and even the customer's distance from the hotel. This helps hotels merchandise special offers to specific markets that it wants to target.
  • Rate Match. This is a built-in price-checking tool that checks rates against OTA sites. If it finds a lower rate elsewhere, the system can match, or even beat, the price and make that rate instantly bookable through the booking engine.
  • TT Web. This new website platform is dynamically connected to the CRS and allows hotels to display live rates on their page and the number of reservations made in the last 48 hours. For example, check out 24northhotel.com and click on the Rooms page to see live rates in action.

4. Why should someone in the independent hospitality industry use Travel Tipper for their online booking engine?

Travel Tipper's booking engine is designed to improve conversions by simplifying the booking process. It also integrates several conversion-drive features based on consumer psychology. Incidentally, many of these factors are the same ones that OTAs use. We also offer many merchandising tools that help hotels better expand and market their offerings.

 

 

A few of the features of the booking engine:

  • Emphasis on large, almost full-screen imagery
  • Multi-step booking to minimise choice, which improves conversions. In our classic booking engine, you choose the room first, then the rate plan, instead of listing together with all those options.
  • Strike-through pricing to indicate discounts and deals.
  • Recent booking volume to show popularity and increase urgency.
  • Multi-room bookings.
  • Brand portals for hotel groups allow you to cross-promote sister properties.
  • Automatically generated landing pages for special offers and packages, with a unique URL for analytics and tracking.

5. What other services do you offer?

In addition to our booking engine and CRS, we offer full-service hotel distribution, including channel manager, GDS, and call centre. We also offer a hotel-specific website platform with full-service web design and development, plus digital marketing, including search and social marketing, ad retargeting, meta search, and graphics services.

6. What are your rates for using Travel Tripper?

Rates vary per hotel based on the products and services provided. Our booking engine runs primarily on a commission model, with a per-booking fee, so it's in our best interests to ensure that your hotel's direct booking strategy is thriving!

7. What is the one bit of advice you would pass on to an independent hotel owner to help boost their direct bookings?

There is no one magic spell, no “set and forget” solution, that will help you win direct bookings. You should start from a baseline of best practices in e-commerce and online booking, then work on an ongoing strategy that must be continuously tested, analysed, refined, and adjusted. Strive to improve.

The market will always change, and hotels must evolve and adapt to the changing conditions.

Staying on top of these changes is important to stay ahead of the curve. That's what we are doing at Travel Tripper, and that's why we don't consider ourselves just a software vendor or SaaS company; we are your partner in hotel distribution and marketing, and it’s our job to ensure that your hotel is succeeding at capturing direct bookings.

There are several easy wins, some quick and some that take a little more time, which independent hotels can look at to help boost direct bookings.

Run a SpeedTest on your website to see if there are any barriers to booking around speed or appearance. The free test, powered by Google, also gives you advice on improving your rating and making it a more seamless experience for your users. The test can be found at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and is very simple to use.

Invest in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a simple method to take back traffic from the OTAs. There are a number of providers, Travel Tripper included, who specialise in creating cost-effective advertising campaigns designed to bring traffic directly to your site.

Don’t ignore social media! Respond to reviews in a timely manner, and approach the platform as a mix of advertising, customer service and service recovery in equal measures. Try to get people to engage with the story of your property rather than just the bricks and mortar. Remember that all good reviews are valuable, but some bad reviews go viral.

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