The Rainmaker Marketing Academy
The Rainmaker Tourism and Hospitality keeps you up to date with the most recent developments in Digital Presence, Optimization, Reputation and Distribution Management. Every month we publish a dedicated marketing tip or highlight certain travel and consumer trends for the Tourism and Hospitality.
Rainmaker is the brainchild of some of the most experienced hospitality, tourism and digital marketing veterans in the industry. We bring 50 years of experience in the hotel, tourism, sales and marketing fields, as well as more than 15 years’ digital marketing experience to your project.
This is enhanced by over seven years of in-depth research and involvement in the Southern African hospitality and tourism industry, giving us peerless insight into the various source markets, market segments, value chains and market dynamics.
TIP #4 | What is Google Hotel and why is it important for lodges, guesthouses and hotels?
Most leisure lodges, B&Bs and guesthouses in Southern Africa get between 70% and 90% of their bookings through DMCs, who, in turn, get them from their international agents.
Lodgings pay between 20% and 40% of their rates to DMCs. Further fees for so-called ‘fam’ or ‘educational trips’ or ‘brochure contribution’ can also apply. This means that more than half of your revenue or almost 80% of your profit is handed over to someone else, and often does not contribute to the destination as the money leaves the country.
This not only presents a great risk due to one-sided dependency, but also means your business needs to operate on very small margins.
The staggering statistic is that, from the 2 100 registered lodgings in Namibia, only 180 are listed and receiving bookings from Online Travel Agents (OTA) like booking.com, Expedia and many others.
These are bookings from guests who usually cannot be reached through the traditional route of DMCs, Wholesale and their Retail Travel Offices.
The more bookings we can get via OTAs, the more tourists we can bring into the country. Also, you only give away 15-20% of your revenue to an OTA. Profit per booking, compared with a DMC booking, is about 23% higher.
Since July 1, 2017, rainmaker has made Google Hotel available in Southern Africa.
With Google Hotel, lodgings receive direct bookings at rack rate in their own reservation system. Unlike with DMCs and OTAs, all relevant guest data is transparently conveyed to the lodgings 1:1 and therefore the lodgings own the customer, where otherwise the DMC/Wholesaler or the OTA owns the customer and uses all the available data for their marketing.
Bookings can be made directly through the Google search page or another Google service such as Maps and, in the future, probably even in Google Destination. Profit per booking is about 23% higher than with DMC bookings as well.
Rainmaker, as a certified Google agency, can directly link up lodges, hotels, guesthouses and guest-farms to Google Hotel.
There is not only one successful marketing channel for your lodging. There are five. Each one has its purpose, as it addresses special goal markets and market segments.
Successful lodgings manage their optimal sales and marketing-mix between DMCs, local tour operators and DMCs, OTAs, Google Hotel and direct bookings through their own website.
The rainmaker team, supported by the unique holistic 5 Stages of Success methodology, supports lodgings by optimally designing their sales and marketing mix and the entire digital presence in terms of visibility, booking conversion and reputation and therefore achieves a 20% to 30% improvement in occupancy, 30% to 50% in revenue and between 50% and 120% increase in profit.
