Booking.com is one of the most popular online travel agencies, and hotels can use the platform as an additional distribution channel. The platform also offers a Booking admin area or extranet. In this article, you can learn how to use this platform section to optimize your listing and attract a more significant number of bookings.
Table of Contents:
- What Is Booking.com?
- What Is the Booking Admin Extranet?
- What Are Exclusive Booking.com Admin Partner Programs?
- What Are the Main Extranet Strategies to Optimize Your Booking.com Listing?
- Tips to Increase Bookings on the Booking Admin Extranet
- Use the Expedia Extranet Like the Booking Admin Portal
- Use Your VRBO Owner Login Like the Booking Admin Portal
What Is Booking.com?
Booking.com is an online travel agency (OTA) based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and owned by the American company Booking Holdings Inc. The website launched in 1996, and the companion mobile app launched in 2010. It is now available in over 40 languages and boasts nearly 30 million listings.
The Booking.com platform serves as a link between hotel industry vendors and customers. In addition to hotels, Booking.com can also be used by customers to book flights, car rentals, and travel packages. For those in the travel industry, a Booking admin section, the Booking.com extranet, can manage listings.
What Is the Booking Admin Extranet?
The Booking admin extranet is a portal for hotels, airlines, and others in the travel industry who must manage listings and reservations through the platform. Through this service, those involved with hotel management, distribution, and marketing can create a listing, complete with a description and photographs.
Moreover, the extranet allows users to manage reservations made through the platform, provide up-to-date availability information, change room rates, and view payment information. As a result, the Booking admin section of the website is a valuable tool, and learning to use it effectively can significantly boost bookings and business outcomes.
What Are Exclusive Booking.com Admin Partner Programs?
The Booking.com admin section also provides access to some exclusive partner programs. In the sections below, you can learn more about these programs, how they work, and why they are useful.
Genius Program
The Genius program is designed to assist properties with visibility on the platform, which can greatly increase the number of bookings you attract. Vendors who join the Genius program will receive a rankings boost on the OTA search engine results pages, and these properties will be highlighted to the most frequent travelers.
Preferred Partner
The Preferred Partner scheme is an exclusive scheme for properties that rank within the top 30 percent of hotel partners on the platform when ranked by overall performance. In exchange for a small increase in commission fees, hotels receive a significant rankings boost and a symbol showing their Preferred Partner status.
What Are the Main Extranet Strategies to Optimize Your Booking.com Listing?
The Booking admin extranet can optimize your listing, boost visibility, and, ultimately, the number of bookings you generate. Below, you can read about hotel marketing strategies that are worth trying.
Write a Full Property Description
When listing a property using the Booking admin extranet, it is essential to take the time to optimize the property description. In particular, you will need to make sure your description stands out from other hotels, provides a positive impression of the hotel, and is also factually accurate.
You may wish to describe your hotel is location, what facilities it offers, what hotel technology is present, and what attractions or amenities are nearby. The best hotel descriptions will also utilise search engine optimization techniques, such as the effective use of keywords, to boost online visibility.
Availability Calendar and Channel Manager
One of the most important uses of the Booking admin portal is keeping hotel room availability up-to-date. After all, if this information is not accurate at all times, you will encounter missed bookings or overbooking. At any given time, Booking.com users should be able to book an available room without these problems.
A hotel channel manager will make this process much more simple. Linking a channel manager will allow your availability calendar to be continually updated across all distribution channels. Therefore, issues like overbooking can be prevented, and you can ensure that multiple distribution channels do not conflict.
Video: How to update your calendar and prices
Different Rates and Cancellation Policies
Booking.com searches are able to be filtered based on the cancellation policy in place, meaning it is quick and easy to search for hotels that offer free cancellation or partial free cancellation policies. As a result, hotels that operate strict cancellation policies are likely to experience problems associated with reduced visibility.
Hotels can use the Booking admin portal to experiment with different cancellation policies based on demand, but it can be important to maximize visibility when demand is low. On top of this, you should take a strategic approach to your room rates, charging higher prices when demand is at its highest, to maximize revenue.
Tips to Increase Bookings on the Booking Admin Extranet
The following tips will help hotel industry employees increase bookings through the Booking.com admin extranet.
1. Set Country Rates
One of the best ways to maximize bookings via the Booking.com admin extranet is to capitalize on global hotel trends, identify the best strategic targets, and then provide customers in those locations with special prices. This will allow you to generate more bookings from a specific part of the world.
For instance, if your hotel has decided to focus on domestic travel, it may make sense to offer preferential rates to guests from the same country as your hotel. By contrast, if you have identified a particular region as one showing growth potential, offering discounts can help to establish that market as a major source of revenue.
2. Offer Mobile Rates
The Booking admin portal allows users to participate in a mobile rates scheme, which provides a 10 percent discount to users who book through their mobile web browser or the Booking.com mobile app for Android and iOS. However, for hotels, there are several significant advantages to opting in too.
For example, when viewed on a mobile device, participants will receive a boost to visibility on the platform. This includes improved rankings and a symbol next to their listing, indicating that mobile rates are available. While this discount means room revenue is lower, research suggests this leads to a major boost in mobile bookings.
3. Use Focus Finder
One key way using the Booking.com admin section can improve hotel marketing efforts is the Focus Finder tool. This option allows hotels to better understand the customer journey by breaking down the booking process into the key steps customers must go through.
This breakdown allows a hotel to track performance more accurately and gain useful and actionable insights. The main insights are related to the different stages where drop-offs occur, meaning hotels can understand where in the journey customers are most likely to back out; Time can then be spent addressing that specific issue.
4. Offer Discounts & Freebies
Guests will always be focused on maximizing value for money, which means discounts and freebies can serve as an ideal way to expand your customer base. Discounts for customers who book early, for example, can be mutually beneficial, providing greater long-term certainty for a hotel while allowing customers to save money.
Similarly, late booking discounts can be perfect for situations where your hotel has rooms to fill, and filling them at a lower price is far preferable to leaving them empty. When offering a discount on rooms does not make sense, customers can be enticed by freebies, such as free breakfast, free room upgrades, and more.
5. Embrace the Visibility Booster
The platform also offers a visibility booster, accessed from the Booking admin portal. This can go hand-in-hand with various SEO-related hotel marketing trends, allowing properties to maximize online visibility and gain a competitive advantage over rival properties.
This is a relatively straightforward option, which allows hotels to pay higher commission fees, to benefit from greater visibility. The bigger the sacrifice for outgoing commission, the bigger the visibility boost. Combining this with an intelligent pricing strategy makes it possible to increase revenue greatly.
Use the Expedia Extranet Like the Booking Admin Portal
Expedia is another of the world’s top online travel agency platforms and is a popular distribution channel for those seeking to maximize reach. The service provides access to the Expedia Extranet, which has many similar functions to the Booking admin extranet, allowing owners to deploy strategies designed to increase bookings.
In the article “8 Tips & Strategies to Use the Expedia Extranet to Get More Bookings”, you will be able to read about how this platform works and how it can be used to increase the number of customers you attract.
Use Your VRBO Owner Login Like the Booking Admin Portal
VRBO is one of the biggest online platforms vacation rental property owners use. Effective use of the VRBO owner login service can function similarly to the Booking.com admin portal, allowing you to optimize your listing to maximize the number of bookings you can attract.
In the “VRBO Owner Login Strategies & Optimization for More Bookings” article, you will learn much more about using the VRBO platform to increase bookings for your vacation rental property.
Intelligently optimizing your listing through the Booking admin extranet will allow you to maximize both visibility and appeal to Booking.com customers. As a result, you can expect to attract more reservations.
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