Motel Management: Getting the Basics right.
Getting the basics right in Motel Management is a matter of stepping back from your role and into the shoes of your customers. It is sometimes easy to get caught in the day to day and forget the basics. We’ve put together some ideas to level up your motels performance without major expenditure.
Become a customer
Run through the booking, check-in, stay and post stay experience of your customers. Go onto Google Maps, Booking.com, Expedia, Direct on your website. Do the photos, descriptions and reviews push potential customers to stay at your property? Who are your customers and are you catering for their needs, if you cater primarily for business customers - set up your laptop in one of the rooms - are you comfortable, can you get a good internet connection, is the room quiet, and does the A/C keep the room comfortable? Testing should be done when the property is busy and everyone is preferably in-house, this will impact how well your guests can connect and use your WiFi.
Booking.com and Expedia
Photos are a massive conversion factor for your Motel - do you have good quality photos, how do you compare against other properties?
We spend a lot of time looking at Hero Photos - this is the first image of your motel that is displayed, a good hero photo will increase your conversion from browsing to staying.
Test different photos over time, in hot locations Pool Photos might outperform your room photos.
Respond to reviews - it is part of Booking.com’s ranking algorithm that will factor what position on their page you will appear.
GDS or Global Distribution System
Are your rooms distributed on one of the main GDS Systems?
Are there big companies in your town that you are missing out on?
Do some research during the week by checking out the car parks of the other properties.
Look for branded cars to identify what companies are staying
Look at how busy they are compared to your property.
Google Maps
Keep your information up to date, if you have holiday hours submit the update. Google will put a small priority on a Motel that has recently updated their information.
Upload photos regularly.
Trip Advisor
While Trip Advisor is losing ground to Google Local, Booking.com and Expedia, it is still on page one for most towns. Put a small effort into Trip Advisor and you will get more bookings from the channel.
Try and get regular reviews - this is the biggest part of their ranking for each town - speed and quality of reviews will get you moving up their listings in prominence.
Respond to all reviews promptly
Upload regular fresh content
Keep your listing information accurate.
Room Distribution Check
Are all of your rooms listed online without restriction? This is the starting point for room management. You can always block rooms or put restrictions on them if you have key clients you want to cater for, but it is always a good start to have all of your rooms selling on the online channels.
Review Check
Table up your reviews and identify the key sentiments in them ,
Rate Check
Price check your market, you need to work out where you are priced compared to your competitors, and where you want to be priced. This does not mean to set your price cheaper - but you do need to have a strategy. Here are some questions to ask yourself to work out where you want to be priced in the market;
Are we the only Motel in town with a Restaurant?
Does our Motel pricing match the pricing of our restaurant, i.e. are our Motel guests going to pay the prices we serve our dinners at?
Your rooms will typically provide a lot higher net profit
Are we the motel near the lake or one of the areas main attractions?
Are we the motel near the best restaurant or pub?
If we are catering mid-week for workers, it might be a case of they will want to stay in a certain property and the pricing is not the primary reason for this because they are not paying the bill.
Do we have the best parking or most secure parking?
Are we targeting people that have trailers?
Are we one of the only motels with amenity x - a pool, spa, conference facility etc?
Do we want to be priced like we are the best property in town or are we targeting budget conscious travelers.
Remember your pricing will also affect the perception your guests will have of your quality - if you price cheap you will seem cheap and will attract low budget travelers.
Do we have points of differentiation that we can leverage?
Quieter rooms than other properties
Better for longer stays
Are we pricing based on the popularity of different days of the week? Some towns or cities will be really popular on Monday-Thursday and then be really quiet on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
This might be an opportunity to put some rate restrictions on like a minimum length of stay
