SiteMinder, the world’s leading channel manager, is offering a special discount between now and the end of November, 2023.

To learn more about SiteMinder, take a look at these articles on this website:

• SiteMinder – a general overview of the product
• Use SiteMinder To Save Money And Earn More Revenue
• How to Use Turbosuite and SiteMinder to Increase Your Revenue in 2023

The Deal

Save 50% for the first 6 months when adding on Demand Plus.

This offer is only valid for new properties signing up between now and November 30th, 2023.

Demand Plus is featured in the article about saving money and earning more revenue above. It’s the add-on that allows hotels to direct bookings towards the hotel’s website and away from the OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia. Get bookings directly from Google Search results using your Google Business Profile, TripAdvisor, Trivago, and even on a Facebook page. The commission-based fees are lower than Booking.com (as low as 3%) and well worth exploring.

How to Sign Up for the Deal

To take advantage of this offer, fill out the form below. The deal is only offered through the certified SiteMinder Partners, which Four Sides Hospitality Consulting is one of. The information will be passed along to a sales representative at SiteMinder to provide a demo and more information.

If you have questions or would like an initial quote, please put them in the comment box below. You will receive a response within 24 hours.

The post SiteMinder – On Sale Now appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Apple announced yesterday Apple Business Connect, a way for business owners to control their information across Apple Maps, Wallet, Siri, Messages, and more. Business Connect allows the same amount of control as Google Business but offers more integration across all Apple devices. For hotels, it will also offer the opportunity for users to make reservations directly and see special offers for the hotel, restaurant, or other aspect of the hotel.

Get Started

It is easy to get started with Apple Business Connect. Enrolment is through the link and is connected to your Apple ID. If you do not have an Apple ID, you will be able to create one. You will be able to add additional users at a later step.

After signing in, you will be asked to locate your business on Apple Maps. Maps has been populating the business information over time. For hotels, it has been pulling the information from TripAdvisor and Yelp. If your hotel is listed on either of those sites, there should not be a problem locating the hotel.

After agreeing to the terms of service, you will be asked to verify the hotel listing. The easiest way to do this is by Apple calling the hotel and providing a code over the phone. The other option is sending Apple documents which will delay the listing being verified. The verification process is important because without it, you will not be able to upload pictures or change any other information.

The Hotel Listing

The listing for the hotel is going to be fairly basic. The logo and cover image are images that can be modified. The call and website buttons will link to the information you provide (i.e. the phone number could go to a reservations desk rather than the front desk). The Book button gives you two options, TripAdvisor or Booking.com.

This is going to be one of the main differences with the Apple Business listing compared to Google Business listings. With Google, users have the option to check availability and make a reservation directly at the hotel. Maybe that will change for Apple Business in the future.

Modifying the Listing

The listing has a few areas that are able to be changed:

• cover image and logo
• basic description (only 100 characters)
• photos
• amenities
• and other basic information (hours, address, phone number, website)

The photos have to be above a certain minimum size and have a maximum size set. Businesses are only able to upload 100 photos. The full list of size restrictions is found here, Apple Business Connect photo standards.

With the photos, businesses will be able to add a short caption and alt-text for each image. Right now, there is no way to modify the order of the images, so that is something to consider when adding the photos.

Apple is verifying every photo to make sure it is up to their quality standards and does not break any of their rules (harmful language, spammy, discriminatory language, etc).

The one area I was not able to explore was Showcases. From the Apple News release:

Showcases, a new feature in the place card, helps businesses present customers with offers and incentives, like seasonal menu items, product discounts, and more. Businesses can easily update the Showcase section of their place card through Business Connect. Showcases are available to businesses in the US beginning today, and will be available to businesses globally in coming months.

Apple News Release

Overall, I think Apple Business Connect is a quality start to offering more control over the listings that were already available on Apple Maps and other products. I am looking forward to see how Showcases can be used, and what other enhancements Apple will be making with the product in the coming years.

The post How to Start Using Apple Business Connect for Your Hotel appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Earlier this year, Google announced an additional feature to the Google Business Profile for hotels and other accommodations. For over a year, the Google Business Profile featured partner links for hotel reservations to sites like Booking.com and Priceline, plus a link to the website for the hotel. This added feature allows people to search for availability and have the option to book directly at the hotel.

The direct booking feature is simple to setup and even easier for potential guests to use. For properties looking to fill up available space, it is well worth exploring.

Get Started with Google Business Profiles

To get started with the direct booking feature, the hotel needs to claim their business profile on Google Search or Maps. If you have not done this for your property yet, it is something every business owner should do. The Google Business Profile allows you to take control of your profile, adding relevant business information, hours, pictures, deals, and respond to the reviews being left.

In order to claim your business profile, do a search on Google for the business and then click the “Own this business?” link in the profile. Read more about the Google Business Profile to get started.

Add Hotel Rates

After you have the profile claimed, there will be another link in the profile to get started with managing your rates above the search for availability section.

Once you click it, you will be able to view the terms and conditions for the feature. The feature is also undergoing beta testing and is limited in what it can do for right now. For example, you can only set one base rate for one room type. Once guests click through on the direct booking link, they will be able to select a different room type, change the check-in date, etc.

Hotels will also be limited to only having dates be open or closed, no option to limit to dates that only allow arrivals, departures, or minimum stay lengths, and so forth. The feature is best used for dates when there is a lot of rooms still available.

When you first start entering the rates, you will be presented with a calendar for the current month. You can set rates/availability per day by clicking the Edit button, or do a bulk edit by selecting the button at the top.

As you fill out the rates, the Rate Coverage percentage at the top will change. Google would prefer you set rates for at least 365 days. You are able to set rates for several years in advance.

The important thing to remember is the rate is meant to be for your lowest best available rate. Having a lower rate than what is available is not advised. Having a rate that is meant for one of your upperclass rooms may not work as well as you would like, because the search results will be displaying the lowest available rates at the other websites. Potential guests are unlikely to click on the link to book directly at the hotel, if other sites are displaying rates $20+ lower than yours.

The next screen will help you setup the tax rate for your property. You can have multiple tax rates, and the rate can either include or exclude them. The tax breakdown will display before guests click through to book at your website. Again, it will be important to show accurate information to prevent the guests from having any rude surprises when they actually book.

The final step will confirm your booking engine. Google will scan your website to determine the booking engine based on the outgoing links. It identified the SynXis (Sabre) link immediately for one of my client hotels. After confirming the link, Google will then prepare the correct URL to use when a guest clicks on the official website link.

Test It

Once Google has confirmed the booking link, the direct booking link will be live. Run a quick search for some available dates and then again for some dates that are not available to confirm that the link is working. If the hotel is not available for booking, no links will display. Instead, Google will display the information about when the hotel is next available to reserve.

The previous step about confirming the booking engine on the website allows Google to prepare and use the correct URL scheme when the direct booking link is clicked. It will take the guest to the booking engine with the correct check-in/out dates and number of guests. It should allow for a quicker reservation capture, rather than a guest having to re-do a search they already ran.

There is nothing to say about this feature for now. As mentioned previously, it is still in beta, and there will likely be further enhancements as the year progresses in time for the high season in 2023.

If you need further assistance with the product, take a look at this Google website or contact me and I may be able to assist you.

The post How to Get Started with Google Business Profile for Your Hotel and Best Practices appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Below is an investment opportunity available for Canadians only, specifically residents in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec residents only.

addy

addy is a real estatement investment company operating in Canada that allows people to buy stakes in properties for as little as $1.00 all the way up to $1,500.00 per property. They have been operating in Canada for a few years now, quickly growing by purchasing around a dozen properties a year. addy has been buying commercial and mixed-use buildings with steady income from rentals. The properties have been in the lower Mainland, Vernon, Calgary, and other places.

Hotel Montreal Espace Confort is the name of the hotel that has been purchased (which may or may not retain the name). It is currently a 24 room hotel but will be converting a common room into two more hotel rooms. The hotel rooms will be updated to include a kitchenette, dishwasher, new furniture, and more. The biggest change will be the introduction of smart technology into the hotel to make for seamless check-in/out procedures and maintenance of the spaces.

The location of the hotel is in a great area of Montreal. It is a short walk to the metro stations and then a 15-20 minute trip to the downtown core of Montreal (the Bell Centre where the Montreal Canadiens play, McGill University), old Montreal where Notre-Dame Basilica is located, or people can walk around the trendy neighbourhood where the hotel is located.

An added bonus for members will be the option of staying in the hotel, presumably at a discounted rate.

This investment is going live on the website on Tuesday morning, April 5th, and is likely going to sell out within a few days.

For more information about addy and the hotel, visit their website at the link below. There is an extensive PDF showing the plans for the renovations and the financials for how the project will unfold in the coming years.

After making your first deposit, you will receive an additional $25.00 bonus to invest.

The post An Opportunity To Invest In A Hotel In Montreal Quebec appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

It has been a wild year for everyone, but I think the hospitality industry was hit the hardest with the lockdowns, restrictions on travel, and limited restaurant capacities. With the news of the vaccine being developed and released around the world, the light at the end of the tunnel is visible for us all now.

I wanted to write more to help everyone prepare for 2021, but during my preparations for writing this, I discovered a well written post by Xotels. With their post, Hotel Trends for 2021, they highlight a lot of items that I was going to mention. The major trend that I am seeing is a focus on local travel. Exploring regions within a few hours travel time, no flights required, while still willing to spend on travel.

Over at Ideas, Blake Madril writes:

Assumptions like typical seasonality, day-of-week pattern and segment behavior have all been jolted by the pandemic, but this shake-up allows for technology to find new indicators into the changing business. Historical occupancy, ADR or RevPAR will always provide valuable insight, but in today’s market, to adapt means to understand cancelations, new bookings, forecast trends in any direction, shifts in competitor pricing, optimal pricing restricted by manual controls and how these change over the most relevant intervals of time for your business.

It’s a great time to review the past year, look at what your competition is planning, and see how the market has shifted with rates and expectations for lodging. It’s also a good time to expand who you consider to be your competition by researching any larger AirBnBs in the area.

I also enjoyed this roundup of hotel experts around the world giving their thoughts on Do we need a new revenue management toolkit for 2021?

If you have other resources I should include here, please contact me and I will update the post.

Hotel Revenue Pickup Report – 2021

The pickup report spreadsheet has been updated for 2021. Because of how difficult this past year was for hospitality professionals, I am offering a discount on the pickup report for the next month. If you have not been using a pickup report, 2021 is a great time to get started with one to help you generate future success with your hotel(s).

Learn more about the revenue pickup report.

The post Getting Ready for 2021: Links, Revenue Pickup Report appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

June is the month that most property owners transition their rentals from long-term rentals to short-term vacation rentals. There is a lot that goes into preparing a property to have it available for summer rentals, from the photos and advertising, to managing the bookings, and finally to checking in the guests and making their stay be exceptional.

There are a lot of resources online to help you with all the various steps. One of the best sites available to help you become a better AirBnB host is How to Host.

They have offer a variety of services: short-term property management in the Okanagan, consulting services from a distance, and, their latest offering, a template package for hosts to have beautifully designed signage and paperwork.

AirBnB Host Bundle

These templates were designed in Canva, a free, online graphic design platform that can be used to make all sorts of images and documents to be shared online. With the templates being made in Canva, adjusting them to your colour palette and changing the images will be simple for everyone to do.

Included in the bundle is a wide assortment of documents that every host will require for their property:

• guest welcome guidebook
• house items and cleaning checklists
• welcome and WiFi signs
• check out checklist

The guidebook is 22 pages in length, covering all aspects of a guest’s stay at your property. Meet the host, about the home, house rules, emergency info, information about the area, and more.

It is a well-thought-out guidebook and looks gorgeous. Every AirBnB or VRBO host property should have a guidebook like this made available for guests. It will help with the overall presentation of your rental property.

Independent hotels and motels will love using the guidebook as well. It can be easily changed for each type of room you offer or have a generalized one for the property. There would also be the opportunity of having local restaurants and attractions pay for advertising in the guidebook – an additional source of income.

There are a variety of templates available and a short ebook as well.

The post Download a Guestbook Template for Your Airbnb or Hotel appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

As 2020 begins, we look back at 2019 to see what went wrong, what worked, and what the projections are looking like for the year ahead. The previous post covered Hotel Reputation. This post is going to look at things to review regarding hotel revenue. More specifically, it will look at the room revenue generated at the hotel, but it will be important to analyze other revenue streams the hotel relies on (restaurant, cafes, spa facilities, etc.)

Monthly Breakdown

The first step to do is to review the monthly breakdown of the revenues. Focus on the seasons or similar periods through the year. For example, don’t compare July to January if July is during your peak season and January is not, compare it to August. If hotel revenues aren’t consistent during the season, start drilling down to see where the weaknesses were. Compare not only to last year but to a 3- or 5-year average of the season to notice some trends that need to be stopped or built upon.

Segment Breakdown

After the monthly breakdown is completed, use it to target specific periods that need further investigation. There are several ways guests can be segmented: rate plan booked, guest type, location of the guest, the company the guest is an employee of. Segmenting the guest by rate plan booked is generally the easiest to gather data for with most property management systems.

Like the monthly breakdown, compare how the segments compared to the last year and a larger period before. If you notice a drop in one segment, but an increase in another, take note of it to investigate further. The next action of the analysis depends on the segment that needs to be investigated. Contact a company representative or travel agent to inquire why a company’s bookings dropped or find some local economic reports to discover how tourism fared through the city or region.

One factor to note is a drop in one segment may not necessarily be a bad thing. Perhaps your hotel has a regular client that has been locked into a significantly low daily rate compared to newer clients. If that lower value client drops out, it can likely be filled with a newer and higher paying client or other type of guests.

One way to segment the hotel that is generally overlooked is to analyze the occupancy and ADR generated from different room types. Are the hotel suites getting booked at a very low occupancy rate? May need to lower the rate, market it differently, or work with the front desk agents on trying to upsell the suites at a lower rate to help fill up the regular hotel rooms. Are the rooms with two beds being booked less often than single bed rooms? The hotel may want to eliminate some of the two bed rooms and only have one larger bed. Something else to look at it is room usage of similar types. Some bedding and furniture may become more worn out if it is overused compared to similar rooms.

Market Analysis

Analyzing your local competitive market will be extremely valuable to determine how the hotel is performing overall and help set your hotel rates for 2020 and beyond. The most basic step is to create a spreadsheet listing your hotel’s rates that are available publicly and compare to your competition. Choose hotels that are in your immediate vicinity and comparable amenities. It will be unfair to compare your 3 Star hotel to a 5 Star Resort. Try to compare different periods through the year by using their online reservation systems. Use their rates to help determine how to place yourself in the market depending on the financial needs of the hotel.

A further step of analysis will involve purchasing market reports from STR, CBRE, or another local hotel research firm. The reports they provide are generally accurate to provide you information, such as, occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, and other items of note. They are also valuable in aiding you forecast hotel occupancy for the region soon.

Another area to consider is tourism and economic reports being produced locally, by region, or nationally. These reports can highlight number of passengers coming through the airport, crossing borders, and may have broad numbers for the hotels. That last item is especially true if there is a local hotel tax that hotels must submit records for. The best part of these reports is they are most likely going to be free.

Pickup Report Analysis

A tool that most hotel revenue managers have been using to help them with their analysis is a hotel revenue pickup report. There is a free and paid version on this site.

The pickup report allows you to see exactly what the busiest days were for reservations, which periods get booked up the earliest/latest, and how far out people are booking rooms for future months. The more consistent you are with the pickup report, the better, as it will give you a wealth of information that most property management systems can’t extract easily.

Additional Resources

There are a wealth of articles that can be read to help you analyze your previous year. Here are a selection to help get you started:

• Top 10 Revenue Management Articles and Tips to Read for a Successful 2020 from Xotels
• Revenue Management 2020 – eHotelier Industry Journal
• Top 10 Revenue Management Tips for Winning in 2020 – Hotel News
• How to Get Revenue Management Right for 2020 and Beyond? – Hotel Business Weekly
• 2020: A Vision for Revenue Management in the Next Decade – Hospitality Net

Want to learn more? Send me an email and let’s start the conversation.

The post Hotel Review and Planning for 2020: Revenue appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

I’ve written previously about the importance of Owning Your Guests. My preferred service to use and suggest to others has been GuestFolio. In short, it allows you to craft various emails to send to all your guests pre and post-stay or during their stay. Provide them with information about airport shuttle times or the weather, and ask them to fill out a survey afterwards, and so forth.

Some property management systems allow you to do this as well, mainly cloud-based ones like WebRezPro. GuestFolio integrates with so many PMS’s that it’s become a leader in communicating with your guests and helping hotels increase their revenues.

All this leads to an email I received from TripAdvisor earlier this week with the subject, “Please Respond By March 2.” Opening the email up told me they had a survey to fill out about possible new features for TripAdvisor.

The survey was very short, and this is what it had laid out:

TripAdvisor New Features

For each of the questions, TripAdvisor asked you how willing you would be to use a service that offered each concept. If you selected “Extremely Likely” or close to it, you were asked to specify prices that you would consider to be fair, too expensive, or too cheap. 

Interestingly, most of the features they’ve listed are very similar to what GuestFolio offers their clients. The one thing that GuestFolio doesn’t do currently is allow communications through a messaging app or texting. There are other apps that allow this, such as TrustYou.

Right now, all of those options are more powerful than what TripAdvisor is proposing, but it is definitely a service to keep your eyes on in the coming months. 

The post TripAdvisor Working On GuestFolio and TrustYou Competitor appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

“Study the past to define the future.” — Confucius

This post is to shed some light on how to get the most value from a hotel revenue pickup report.

Be Diligent

The first step that needs to be mentioned is how important it is to be diligent in when you gather the information. The pickup report is meant to analyze previous data by comparing apples to apples. If you skip a few days, you will have gaps in your data that is not beneficial to you. It may seem like a pain to build the habit of entering the data on a daily basis, but the payoff will be immense.

After you go through the process of collecting the rooms and revenue on the books, you will open doors to what kind of information you can extract from it.

Setup Your Rules

Looking at all the numbers can be confusing and dizzying. The pickup sheet has some of the rows highlighted to make it a bit easier, but for analyzing the numbers you will want to setup conditional highlights.

Conditional highlights are a way of creating rules for each cell and then highlighting the ones that match the rule. The rules are going to be more specific to your property (i.e. the rules created for a 32 room hotel will be different than a 100 room hotel), which are why they aren’t built into the pickup report already. The rules can be created for any of the sheets, depending on what information would be valuable to you.

Some examples:

• highlighting occupancy in the data set (red for sold-out, yellow for 80-95% full, green for 65-80%.)
• highlighting revenue in the data set being over set intervals
• highlight revenue based on the ADR (conditional highlights can include formulas that involve other cells)
• highlight rooms picked up in the monthly sheets
• highlight revenue or ADR in the monthly sheets

The conditional highlights let you see patterns more clearly than by looking at the plain numbers. By having some leeway with the numbers, patterns will be more visible.

Pattern Recognition

Once your conditional highlights are setup, you can easily zoom in on the data to spot trends. For the sample data above, I created a separate grid to put more emphasis on the weekends as that is what I am more generally interested in. Looking across the 6-8 lines in the spreadsheet above, i can notice a trend of a general lead-time for most reservations of 4-5 days, plus more activity the day before the arrival date. This allows me to instruct the Front Desk agents to not offer discounts 4 days in advance, potentially discount 2-3 days out, and then remain firm with the rates with last minute reservations. 

I can also go back and see that the bulk of the reservations are likely one night only given the number of gaps in the highlighted cells (when looking down the column.) When I look down the column for the 4th, I can see that I had a string of days of 4, 1, 2, 2, 3, and 0 reservations. That tells me that I had at least 3 single night reservations the first night, and 1 on the fifth night. Depending on the overall occupancy levels, incentives could be created to encourage people to stay additional nights. 

Another thing I could pick up on is very few people are booking both Friday and Saturday nights. When looking down the columns, I can see more reservations being made for Friday than Saturday, and vice versa. If that trend continued (which it does in the first image), a weekend package could be created to help encourage couples to have getaways to help fill up the hotel. 

While the pickup report can give you a lot of information in these regards, you still need to compare it to your actual stay information to make the best decision. For example, with one hotel I work with, they host international flight crews on the weekends that fill up the hotel. That makes it impossible to offer weekend getaways because no one will be able to book it. That kind of information isn’t going to show up in the pickup reports. 

Planning For Next Year

Analyzing the data from the current year is useful to notice short-term trends (i.e. lead time for reservations), but it can also be very instructive for longterm planning. By using the monthly pickup sheets (again, being diligent about entering the data every month), new trends will emerge. The trends are much easier to pick up on so I haven’t highlighted the cells this time. 

In the monthly pickup sheet, the blue columns are the difference between that month and the data the month prior, giving you the pickup rooms and revenue for reservations made in that month. Looking across the May-July lines, you can see that in February they didn’t have much activity, lots of activity in March and April, and then relatively little in May. That would allow me to be more firm in pricing for March and April when taking reservations for the summer months. The closer I was to the month, I may have to lower rates or come up with other promotions to encourage people to book and fill the hotel up. 

Again, it will be important to compare to your actual stay information and be aware of any large group blocks being entered. Maybe a large convention booked for June in March, but it only occurs once a year, or maybe March is when the international flight crew books their rooms for the summer months.

There are a lot of variables in play, but the monthly pickup sheet helps highlight those potential areas that requires further investigation.

After filling out your pickup report on a regular basis, you will have a lot of information that will help guide your hotel operation. All of the information you extract from this report should be shared with other team members, so that collectively you can shape a revenue management strategy that aligns with the hotel’s needs and works well with the marketing and sales plans. Your competition is unlikely to be using a report like this, so use it to your advantage and watch your revenues grow.

If you haven’t already, you can grab a copy of the pickup report below, and if you want to learn more about reading forecast and pickup reports, check out the book below. It’s a fantastic resource for revenue managers that are new to the profession, or general managers that want to learn more.

The post How to Get the Most Value From a Hotel Pickup Report appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.

Trivago announced today their list of the top hotels in Canada. This list of hotels is divided up by regions (British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, etc.) and is based upon the cumulative reviews from sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Booking.com. The list contains a lot of recognizable names for hotels in Canada (for good reason) but also contains one of the hotels I am associated with.

The SKKY Hotel in Whitehorse, Yukon was named as the top hotel in Northern Canada. That is no minor achievement given how competitive the hotels in Whitehorse are (every 3 star hotel has undergone major renovations in the past three years), but also how competitive the hotels in Yellowknife and other areas of the north are. Being located close to the mineral deposits, oil fields, and significant tourist destinations, most of the hotels have major money behind them to help with renovations and marketing.

As I detailed in my case study about the hotel, the SKKY Hotel is a small boutique hotel, backed by a small partnership. The amount of money spent on marketing and new development for the hotel is relatively minor compared to the main competition in the city, and most likely Yellowknife. 

The team I have been leading the past five years are all quite proud of this accomplishment and look forward to building upon the great success they have already achieved. 

The post Trivago’s List of Top Hotels in Canada appeared first on Four Sides Hospitality Consulting | Hotel and Airbnb Consultant | Canada.