Distribution is crucial to the success of any hotel. I am even tempted to think that distribution is more important than anything else in such businesses.
Here’s the reason: no matter how brilliant your hotel or your product is, regardless of how smart your marketing is or how unique the service and location is, if you’re not able to effectively sell your product to consumers, your business will fail.
If the money doesn’t come in, if you’re unable to create a healthy top-line income, your business will collapse eventually.
Before we get into more details on how to distribute your hotel rooms, let’s attempt to distinguish sales from distribution. I’d like to separate the action of you completing a direct sale from a third party completing a transaction for your hotel.
Sales is the term I prefer to use when you actually execute a sale. Distribution, on the other hand, is equal to the sum of all sales for your property and services, both direct sales and indirect sales, via any channel.
Who’s involved in distribution then?
Given the importance of distribution, when did you last stop for a moment, take a step back and think about which members of your team truly contribute to the success of a distribution strategy?
Obviously all the commercial departments are involved - marketing, sales, reservations, revenue management. But what about your front-of-house staff, your engineers, security, food and beverage and housekeeping departments?
Nowadays their work directly affects consumer reviews and thus link into a successful distribution strategy of your hotel.
Therefore, if distribution is that crucial, and everything you and your team do deeply impacts the success of your hotel, it’s time to stop scratching the surface. It is time to take a deep dive into the world of hotel distribution.
It’s time to take control of the success of your business.
Infinite complexity
Before we dig deep into the subject, we need to realize that we’re going to approach a very complex environment. If I’d start drawing up a chart with all possible ways a consumer can get to your hotel and book a room, I could literally fill a soccer field with the possibilities, and still not be anywhere close to the full picture.
In other words, once consumers reach you, directly or indirectly, they’ve already been through a complex maze of searches, options and decisions, to find you and to book a room with you.
If you want to get an idea of how many exact searches lead to your hotel, type your hotel name between into Google (for example, "Hotel Ribera de Triana in Seville").
This will only get you a limited idea of how many searches can finally lead to your hotel. This is nothing but an exact branded search for your hotel, in one language.
Consider the general, non-branded search and you’ll realize that there are millions of other ways to search, research and book travel.
The average consumer search could look something like this:
A simplified view of hotel distribution
Trying to explain distribution by diving into the complexity is probably not going to get me or you very far. So instead of considering the complexity, let’s try to figure out a simplified distribution landscape.
So please forget about all marketing and sales channels, forget about technology and search.
How would you divide the distribution landscape when explaining it to a new employee, one who has never set foot in a hotel? How simple can you make it?
I came to a division of the landscape into four basic areas:
- Direct online
- Direct offline
- Indirect online
- Indirect offline
Over the next few articles on the subject we will cover numerous technology and distribution tactics, interests of different parties in the game of selling hotel rooms and other services, as well as examining what are the actual interests of consumers, distributors and, of course, hoteliers.