Better reviews & more bookings for your HOTEL – cost-effective measures
Whether hotel chain, boutique hotel, budget or upscale – as a hotel owner or hotel manager, you constantly ask yourself: "What cost-effective measures can I take to significantly increase my occupancy in future?"
As a 5-star hotelier, Cottonbabe founder Jens Liebhauser knows this question well. Today we show you why it pays to pay particular attention to comfort and furnishings.
Much like product reviews on online marketplaces, the star ratings on hotel platforms such as booking.com, expedia.com or tripadvisor.com have an immense influence on how guests book.
The aim of our blog post is therefore to examine the individual star ratings and show cost-effective improvements.
How is the rating made up?
The star ratings on the platforms are made up only slightly differently. Some of the parameters have different names or are weighted slightly differently. Ultimately, however, the same categories can be identified:
Location:
The location is a central component of every hotel. However, once a hotel has opened, it can no longer be changed – unless you reopen the hotel elsewhere, which is not an option for most hotel owners and brings entirely different challenges.
❌ Conclusion: The location of a hotel cannot be influenced.
Staff, service & cleanliness:
We would group these three points together. All of them require a sufficient number of employees working in the various areas of the hotel. However, staff costs are often the decisive cost driver for a hotel.
The right number and distribution of staff is particularly difficult to calculate when occupancy can fluctuate quickly depending on the season. Understaffing has a negative effect on guest satisfaction and online reviews, while overstaffing has a negative effect on your own costs.
❌ Conclusion: To get a better rating, you would have to invest a great deal of money in staff.
Value for money:
Value for money tends to be a subjective factor for every guest. As a hotel owner, it is not ideal to have a 10/10 for value for money, as you would then definitely be too cheap. A rating of 3/10 is not ideal either, as the guest would then feel they are paying too much for what they get.
❌ Conclusion: As a hotel owner, you should not aim for a top rating on this point, as this would have a negative impact on the revenue side.
Facilities:
The term facilities is very broad. Here, we include the exterior appearance and the interior furnishings of the hotel. If, for example, the hotel is still furnished in the style of the 1970s, extensive modernisation and the replacement of furniture and decorative elements would be necessary.
❌ Conclusion: Facilities are definitely a very cost-intensive point, as modernisation would have to be carried out uniformly and would therefore affect the entire hotel.
Comfort & Wi-Fi:
That leaves just two points that you as a hotel owner can improve cost-effectively. We would like to take a closer look at these two.
Wi-Fi:
For this, you need a one-off fibre-optic connection, a suitable telecoms provider and enough routers to distribute Wi-Fi evenly throughout the hotel without dropouts. If you also remove the password – which your guests will thank you for – you improve one of the rating categories on booking.com cost-effectively and permanently.
Comfort:
The second interesting point is comfort. If a guest spends 24 hours in your hotel, they will inevitably spend a third of that time in bed.
A generous spring mattress, high-quality duvets and pillows with white goose down and silky-soft bed linen will decide not only the star rating in the comfort category, but the overall rating as well. Because if your guest has a bad night, even a lavish breakfast the next morning can at best smooth things over – but no longer lead to complete satisfaction.
With Cottonbabe, we already equip a number of hotels in Germany, Austria and Switzerland – up to 5-star superior hotels – with our products. We would be happy to talk to you about ways of improving comfort in your hotel.
Simply send us an email at: info@cottonbabe.com
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