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How hotel marketers are tweaking flash sale offers

July 04, 2012 | Hotel Marketing

As hotel companies get to grips with the flash sales model, they are finding that it can be viewed as the ultimate early bird special or as a money-down guarantee advance purchase scheme.

Consumers are ready to grab deals, and intermediaries are there to offer them, but are hotel companies ready to host these guests?

Unsurprisingly hotels have had their concerns about eroding brand value. With the proliferation of players they have been choosy about partners as flash sales sites increasingly fail to deliver. This is down to too many players in the market, deal fatigue, concerns about rate integrity and so on.

However, hotels are now experimenting with different possibilities. Among those being tested are: tweaking offers with various bundling options, twin or multi-destination packages, geographical targets, extended validity of for use of the offer and so on. The focus is moving away from being purely discount based. Two clear lessons have emerged:

- With geographical targets flash sales companies can be of use. For example, if there is a flash sales company operating in the Gulf area, and your hotel wants to penetrate this region, then by all means tie up with them. However, doing flash sales in one’s regular market arena is not advisable.

- The utilisation date for various vouchers is also being extended. Three to five months used to be typical but this is now more like 12 to 15 months. Voucher holders can now choose to take their intended stay over an extended period. For the hotel these so-called low priced room nights will not have a sudden massive impact on the hotel’s average rate over a short period.

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