B&Bs missing the boat with booking engines

Marketing a B&B/guest house/backpacker hotel is equally as important as marketing a chain of hotels and will never be enough. Having a website for your B&B does not mean guests will be rolling into your establishment non-stop; it's only a start to the marketing journey.

Marketing methods and budgets

Big hotel chains employ various marketing methods to spread the word about their brands, because they have budgets allocated for that exercise. They sign up PR firms to take care of their media relations and go into exclusive distribution agreements with major global distribution systems such as Galileo and Worldspan.

Take low-cost airline 1Time as an example. It has an exclusive agreement in place with Southern Sun, which means this hotel group is able to sell its inventory through the airline's website. Such an agreement is not possible for Lolo's B&B in Diepkloof (Soweto), for obvious reasons… it's too small.

Being too small, however, doesn't mean such an operator is always fully booked. Occupancy affects all operators in the food chain. So this means small operators also need to be forever searching for better ways of improving their occupancy rate.

Booking engines

This is where the unpaid sales force (booking engines) comes into play. As an owner-manager, this means you should be flexible with your rates, in order to exploit the available resources to market your property. By their nature, booking engines monetise their service through charging a commission for every booking they generate for your property.

As a lodging operator, it means you should be open to adjust your rates to include such commission. At the end of the day, you're in business to make a profit and, at the same time, booking engine providers are offering a service to make a profit. Both parties complement each other and can't survive without the other.

There are various booking engine in the market which serves different market segments. For the purposes of this article, I'll focus on Web Reservations International that delivers online reservations to over 50 000 properties in 165 countries through a network of owned sites and affiliate partners.

Outsourced sales agent

This Ireland-based company offers technology that enables travellers from across the globe to access available rooms in all properties listed to their facility. As a B&B owner, this means Web Reservations International is your outsourced sales agent, since its duty is to get you bookings.

For every booking received through it, the guests pay it a deposit (which translates into its commission), with the balance paid at your property before the guest departs.

Web Reservations International owns a number of in-house travel portals, with www.hostelworld.com being its popular brand and with over 3000 affiliate (independent) websites all selling rooms on its behalf. This means that by adding your property to Web Reservations International, you would have opened up into new markets that your own website would have never been able to reach.

• Are you a lodging operator using booking engines to market your property? If so, tell us about your experience in using booking engines.