Content is the key to effective and targeted communication from the industry’s end to the customer in today’s hospitality landscape. Content is a lot more dynamic now and has reignited as one of the key revenue drivers for any hotel in the industry. For example, 51% of travelers in the U.S.A. spend around seven days before a trip conducting research. You will most likely lose a conversion if they aren’t greeted with fresh content about your hotel and notice a content disparity across different channels.
Content is at the center of not only hotels and hoteliers but also GDS platforms and OTAs. But the impact of content is only seen when it is distributed uniformly across all channels. Steer yourself from the misconception that you must focus on updating content on some of your most responsive and active OTAs and channels. Content must be distributed consistently across all of your channels.
But won’t that be very tedious? How can they monitor and update every channel at once when hotels and hoteliers use so many different channels? If you wish to find out, read on!
Current State of Content Management in Hotels
Content is crucial to every hotel’s distribution and management strategy. Content is much more dynamic than most hoteliers, and other hospitality industry members give it credit. Giving you the ability to relay critical information to your partners and customers instantly, content is one of the biggest revenue drivers in 2022.
But why so? Why is investing in content so necessary? Simply put, you need content to accurately communicate the information you want to convey to your customer. Therefore, having better and more optimized content will result in more excellent traction on OTA platforms and across channels.
A 2019 survey by Expedia states that for the average traveler, 50% of their decisions are influenced by informative content. Other factors that are involved in the decision-making process include appealing imagery (54%), deals (53%), simple language (35%), etc. This is why providing your customers and partners with up-to-date content is crucial. Additionally, if your content is inconsistent across channels and platforms, you will make the customer’s booking experience unpleasant.
Furthermore, many companies usually experience the cold start problem, where hotels will latch onto an OTA and focus all their content creation efforts on that particular OTA. They’ll quickly get onto this OTA without enough content. Once the content doesn’t kick off, they have less incentive to update the content again. As a result, content retakes a backseat, killing the opportunity for a great start to your content marketing strategy. As a result, they get caught in a vicious cycle, and the content is never released.
The number of interactions in the industry (between hotels, visitors, OTAs, GDSs, etc.) makes it challenging to accurately distribute all the rooms. Furthermore, what may be effective in one area or channel may not be applicable elsewhere. How can this content gap be filled? How can you ensure that all platforms and channels have the same content?
The solution lies in the power of AI.
AI-powered Hotel Content Management System
Before the onset of the pandemic, content updating was done manually by quite a few hotels. In fact, a lot of hoteliers used to maintain a manual excel sheet of all the properties they owned. Even then, they would record the property scores and let the partners know if the score fell short of expectations.
This was quite a cumbersome process, which was eventually eliminated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it can be very challenging to keep up with the developments across all of your channels when there are so many content interactions taking place at once in the hospitality sector.
Some say it is impossible, but is it?
What if you had an AI-based content distribution tool at your disposal? What if you could update all of your content parameters on a single screen paired with a scoring engine that also provides content recommendations? What if you could do all this, and go beyond possible?
This is precisely what Content-AI — RateGain’s brand new AI-based tool — does for you.
What is Content-AI? Why do you need it?
Content-AI happens to be the first of its kind hotel content management system, leveraging AI capabilities to boost conversion rates, engagement, and revenue.
A broken hotel management and distribution playbook will lose you a lot of revenue. In fact, maintaining content parity across countless channels and demand partners has become an absolute task. With Content-AI at your disposal, you can improve content strength across all your preferred channels and demand partners. Some features that come paired with the platform are as follows:
- AI-powered content optimization
- Improved visibility on demand partners with auto-generated tags
- Content parity across all channels with a single click
- A content wizard to drive higher conversions and bring up your conversion rates
- Ease of use
- Growth in operational efficiency and so much more
With the massive push towards the importance of content in the hospitality industry, there is a lot of chaos regarding the exchange of information and rates across multiple platforms. The difficulty of keeping track of all your channel activity can directly contribute to the staffing shortage the hospitality sector is currently experiencing.
Why employ more people when you can have AI segregate your entire content distribution process? Maintaining content parity across every channel you use is necessary, and that is precisely what Content-AI does for you. A robust platform that collates all your content parameters on one screen is perfect for taking on your content distribution and management woes. Thus, make wise rather than impulsive content investment decisions. Allow Content-AI to take control of your business’s content distribution, and watch as your ROI soars to the heights you’ve always dreamed of.
Download our latest whitepaper: Content Management: The Achilles Heel For Hotels In 2023.
