Direct Bookings Will Move to Target Ownership and “Lifetime Value,” as OTAs and Big Hotel Players Continue to Dance and Spar
NEW YORK and LONDON, December 21, 2017 – Fornova closed 2017 with year over year revenue growth in excess of 50%, raised a Series B financing to spur accelerated expansion in the year ahead, and was recognized as one the year’s most innovative companies by industry authority Lodging magazine in the U.S.
Capping the success, CEO Dori Stein anticipates a year of even faster growth in 2018, and pointed to three trends in distribution that all hotels should pay attention to, in the coming year:
1. In a bid to create more value to their hotel partners, OTAs will continue to improve their tools and programs for hoteliers to help enhance placement and boost revenue – especially during low-occupancy periods.
2. Focus on direct-bookings will continue, but emphasis will move from cost to ownership and Life Time Value of guests. This trend will make hotels and OTAs rethink how they engage with each other.
3. Bigger hotel brands and companies will use data and intelligence to be vigilant and collaborate more closely with their hotel level revenue and distribution teams to constrain promotions on OTAs, managing distribution more actively to ensure direct price is always the best available.
Stein said, “With continuing and evolving dynamics between hotels and OTAs, the drive to encourage direct booking and other broad trends dominating industry discussion, we are pleased to share our thinking on the year ahead in distribution – based on our work and data culled from thousands of hotels in every market around the world. While it’s clear that it will be another year of rapid change for the industry, we are certain that the most important principle will continue to be the ability to effectively and dynamically manage hotel distribution across both direct and indirect channels. We look forward to another year of rapid expansion at Fornova, as we help hotels manage challenges to optimize their distribution in 2018.”
Fornova’s patented technologies for scanning, extracting and analysing massive amounts of information from the online hotel distribution channels provide an advanced intelligence solution that allows hotels to better understand how their hotels are priced, ranked and presented on the different online distribution channels.
