Hotels should work with OTAs for visibility and to fill the last rooms, inside a healthy business mix. Khalifa Saqer calls OTAs the biggest visibility for a property entering a market and says listings must speak to the traveler. Bart Hilgers warns that most OTA guests are price driven and an OTA profile cannot tell your full story. Adrien Mathieu sees independents partly bypassing OTAs with their own AI agent.
What 3 hotel leaders say
Khalifa Saqer
CEO, HostelHop
“if you're trying to get into the market, you need visibility. And the biggest visibility available right now is the OTAs. This is how you're going to attract the customer. ... Slowly you grow your own customers by making sure you put the value that you have.”
“you have to make sure to communicate to the travelers. Like I've seen this in multiple hostels, like their listing or their description is it's not targeting the travelers, targeting the owners or managers ... You have to make your description more attractive to the kind of travelers that you're trying to target.”
Bart Hilgers
Founder, Six Stars
“You wanna tell your story, but you simply cannot tell your full story ... Because you need to be comparable with other hotels while you were trying to be unique. So the goal is of a strategy that we're designing with the clients is to make it a healthy business mix where the OTA is delivering those room nights, the last rooms to fill up your occupancy”
“it's maybe good for the short term gain of being competitive on pricing €5 cheaper than your competition and having that extra room nights sold. ... the guests that book you through an OTA, they're... Well, the majority of them are price driven, and then they don't book you because you have this amazing concept and story to tell.”
Adrien Mathieu
Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer, Kleio.ai
“If I were, like, an independent or a smaller hotel brand, I would see a great also opportunity to have my own agent ... we'll be able in the future to interact directly with the end user agent. ... And I could also, to a certain extent, bypass the OTA of the world and be really good because my agent is really good at promoting my brand and my hotel”
