To boost direct bookings, many of our clients actively market their property both during peak season and in the quieter months. The costs for acquiring bookings in this way is often much lower than the commission you'll pay with OTA's.
Types of online marketing might include:
- Bulk email campaigns targeting previous guests.
- Paying for a feature in a local tourism organisation's marketing (web page and email).
- Paid for advertising with a third party (per click / per impression).
The one thing they would all have in common is that the guest would click a link which then lands back on your own website for the booking to be completed.
In Caterbook, you can configure a promo code to discount all your regular pricing by a fixed amount or percentage, or create special offers which either apply to a brand new rate (e.g. with mid-week only pricing during October and November), or only discounts your B&B rate, leaving Room Only and Dinner, B&B rates out of the promotion.
Once you have created the code you can add this to your promotional link, so that when guests click through it will pre-populate the promo code field without the need to type it in.
This requires you to have the website booking engine embedded into an existing page of your website - for example https://www.yourhotel.co.uk/book-now/ - this will not work with the pop-up booking screen.
If you have created a promotional code offering a 10% discount (e.g. code "save10"), you would simply add this at the end of your link back to your booking page, as follows:
Add the text "?promoCode=" and your promo code at the end of the URL. In this case it becomes:
https://www.yourhotel.co.uk/book-now/?promoCode=save10