The Booking Extranet is a management platform associated with Booking.com, one of the world’s most popular online travel agencies. In this article, you can learn more about Booking.com and its extranet, along with strategies and tips to help you generate more bookings through the service.

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What is an OTA?

An online travel agency, or OTA for short, is the name given to an online platform that allows customers to explore travel products and services, and make bookings online. Meanwhile, from the perspective of those in the hotel industry, OTAs generate bookings from customers who may not know about their hotel.

An OTA like Booking.com, for example, allows users to search for travel products, including hotels, flights, and airport transfers. In contrast, the Booking Extranet allows hotels to manage their own listing on the platform to attract guests. When a booking is made, the online travel agency takes a commission fee to facilitate the sale.

What is Booking.com?

Booking.com is an online travel agency, with its headquarters in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The platform is primarily marketed as a website and mobile app for booking hotel rooms and other lodgings. However, it also allows customers to book flights, hotel + flight combination packages, car rentals, and airport taxis.

Booking Holdings, Inc. own the platform itself, and this parent company also owns several other major travel-related brands, including Priceline.com, Agoda.com, and Kayak.com.

Booking.com is available in almost 50 languages and has over 25 million listings. The platform was originally launched in 1996 and serves as a third-party, linking customers to hotels and travel businesses. Those businesses can utilize the Booking Extranet to manage their listings and access important information.

What is the Booking.com Extranet?

The Booking.com Extranet, or Booking Extranet, is a management platform connected to the Booking.com service. It allows those in hotel management positions – or management positions with other travel businesses – to oversee reservations and handle almost all aspects of their listing on the online travel agency website.

For hotels, this includes options to add your hotel description, upload high-quality photographs of your hotel, outline the services available within your hotel, and manage important information that can affect bookings, such as updating current room availability and managing your room rates.

The Booking Extranet also includes a search engine, making it much easier to find specific information and various tools for monitoring and analyzing performance. Finally, the Booking Extranet offers hotels options to participate in promotional offers and partner programs.

What Are Exclusive Booking.com Partner Programs?

In addition to having access to the Booking Extranet, those involved with hotel marketing strategies can also participate in some exclusive Booking.com partner programs. More information can be found below:

Genius Partner

The Genius partner program combines with the Genius customer loyalty program, providing hotels with greater exposure and Genius loyalty program members with exclusive discounts. This option can be especially useful for targeting high-value customers who travel and frequently make bookings through the platform.

Video: Highlighting Genius

 

Preferred Partner

The Preferred Partner program is aimed at the top performers on the Booking.com platform. Hotels must meet set criteria regarding bookings, including being within the top 30 percent of hotels on the OTA. Once a hotel becomes a Preferred Partner, it will receive a significant visibility boost in exchange for increased commission fees. This option is ideal for highlighting your hotel as a popular property and ensuring it stands out from rivals.

5 Main Extranet Strategies to Optimize Your Booking.com Listing

The Booking Extranet provides managers and those involved with hotel marketing with the ability to capitalize on a variety of different options and strategies. Below, you can learn about some of the most effective strategies, so that you can optimize your Booking.com listing and attract more guests to your hotel.

Compelling Property Description

One of the most important parts of managing your listing through the Booking.com Extranet is creating a property description for your hotel. This description needs to be compelling and highlight the best qualities of your hotel, but there are several other things that you need to give consideration to as well.

Ideally, you should research and include strategic keywords for search engine optimization. Doing so will then help to increase your visibility on search engines like Google. Your description should also be kept up-to-date if your property changes, or if you add new hotel facilities or services.

Availability Calendar and Channel Manager

To maximize and avoid double bookings, you need to use the Booking Extranet to ensure that your hotel’s availability calendar is always fully up-to-date and accurate.

By far, the best way to achieve this is to use a hotel channel manager, and this should be connected to your property management system. When this is the case, availability information will be automatically updated as and when new bookings are completed, and this will apply not only to Booking.com but across all distribution channels you use.

High-Resolution Images and Videos

Another good tip to increase the revenue earned through the Booking.com platform is to add high-resolution images and video content to your hotel listing. This can be achieved via the Booking Extranet, and adding images and videos can help showcase what your hotel looks like and what it has to offer guests.

Photographs should not only be high resolution but should also be taken by professional photographers with an understanding of lighting and angles. Meanwhile, video content should be used to highlight what your hotel looks like over a typical day. Try to showcase different parts of the hotel, including guest rooms, the reception area, any bars and restaurants, the pool area, function rooms, and the exterior of your property.

Reputation and Review Management

Modern travelers rely heavily on customer feedback and often read online reviews before booking. This makes it crucial to focus strongly on customer service and encourage customers to leave reviews after their stay. However, you must also take steps to manage your hotel’s online reputation carefully.

You can manage your reviews on the platform through the Booking Extranet, and you should take the time to do this. Positive reviews should be responded to with a thank you message, but you should also respond calmly and politely to any negative reviews posted in good faith. For example, you might thank them for their review and for drawing your attention to a problem, and explain what you will do to resolve it.

If malicious reviews are being left, you should contact the Booking.com staff so that these reviews can be removed from the platform. Reputation management software and similar hotel technology can also assist with your review management efforts, making it easier to manage reviews across multiple channels.

Room Rates and Cancellation Fees

Your room rates are going to have a significant influence on demand and the level of bookings you can attract, so you need to come up with a robust pricing strategy, which factors in everything from current levels of demand or anticipated future levels of demand, through to competitors’ pricing and availability.

Beyond this, one of the most significant competitive differentiators on the Booking.com platform is related to cancellation fees. Users of the platform can filter hotels based on whether or not they have a no-refunds policy, and a majority of users do opt for this. With this in mind, it is best to try to avoid cancellation fees, and to adopt a more generous cancellation policy, where you refund what customers have paid and offer them an alternate date.

5 Tips to Increase Bookings on the Booking.com Extranet

Below, you can find several additional tips related to the Booking Extranet, which will allow you to boost interest in your property and increase the number of bookings you can generate from the service.

Make Use of Country Rates

A great option included within the Booking.com platform and Booking Extranet is the ability to use country-specific room rates. This can be especially beneficial when you are trying to attract customers from a particular location, either as part of your marketing strategy or because of events or holidays.

Essentially, this works by providing discounts to users in specific parts of the world. This can also be used to discount users in the same country as your hotel, which can be great if you adopt a local-first strategy. In all cases, you can set the duration of the promotional discount and access performance data.

Introduce Mobile Rates

One of the major hotel trends of recent years has been the upturn in bookings completed entirely on mobile devices. With this in mind, it can be strategically beneficial for hotels to target mobile users and try to boost visibility on the Booking.com mobile app, and mobile rates are a great way to achieve this.

This option within the Booking Extranet allows hotels to automatically apply a 10 percent discount to all bookings made by mobile users. This increases visibility across the mobile app and mobile browsers and can also be a clever way of targeting younger customers, which may have strategic advantages for some hotels.

Use the Focus Finder Tool

Focus Finder is a tool within the Booking.com Extranet, which breaks down the customer journey for users looking to book a room with your hotel. Using this breakdown, the feature compares your performance to similar properties and identifies the points in the booking journey where you see a drop-off.

This tool is an excellent way to identify precisely where customers are getting to in the booking journey before backing out. Focus Finder also provides tailored advice on how you may improve this based on the specific challenges your hotel is facing. As a result, you can see things through customers’ eyes and ultimately boost your performance.

Offer Discounts and Freebies

During times of low demand or other points where it may be strategically advantageous, you should capitalize on the various discounts and freebies to tempt more customers into bookings. The options here can include last-minute deals, which are great when you need to fill rooms, or early bird discounts, which can help you to sell rooms in advance.

Alternatively, you might offer discounts on additional services, like food and drink, or throw in freebies within your hotel. Regardless of the precise discounts or special offers, you opt for, the option to run these promotional deals can also help to boost your overall visibility on the OTA too.

Capitalise on the Visibility Booster

The last tip to help hotels increase bookings via the Booking Extranet is using the built-in Visibility Booster function. Essentially, this is a mutually beneficial tool, which can be extremely helpful for new hotels. These hotels need to boost their online visibility or hotels that have rooms to fill quickly.

The Visibility Booster works as follows: you agree to increase the amount of commission that Booking.com take, and in exchange, the Booking.com platform boosts your placement on hotel search results pages. Hotels can also opt in and out of the Visibility Booster at any time, meaning it can be used to deliver short or long-term results.

12 Other Online Travel Agencies

While the Booking Extranet is a great tool for generating more hotel bookings, it is important to stress that Booking.com is not the only online travel agency worth exploring. Some other major options include Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline.com, and Trip Advisor, and each platform has unique qualities and benefits.

Read “12 Online Travel Agents (OTAs) to Increase Your Hotel Bookings” for more on the various online travel agencies that exist, along with information on what they each have to offer hotel owners, managers, and marketers.

Tips for Use on the Booking Extranet and Other OTAs

While the tips and strategies outlined in this article will assist you with the Booking.com and Booking Extranet, it is important that you also adopt broader OTA strategies. This can include ensuring you are using the right mix of platforms, ensuring you are using a distribution channel manager, and much more.

Check out “10 Tips to Increase Your Hotel Bookings Through OTAs” for a breakdown of how online travel agencies can help your hotel, along with specific tips on how to get the most from these third-party platforms.

Gain More Bookings Through the Expedia Extranet

In addition to using the Booking Extranet to get the most from Booking.com, it is worth learning about Expedia and the Expedia Extranet too. This OTA and management platform provide functionality similar to the Booking.com equivalent, but Expedia has unique features and offerings to get to grips with.

Look at “Tips & Strategies to Use the Expedia Extranet to Get More Bookings” to learn more about the Expedia platform and the various ways the Expedia Extranet can benefit your hotel.

Using the Booking.com platform and the Booking Extranet, hotels can boost visibility on the platform, keep their hotel information up-to-date, access performance data, and generate more bookings.

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This article is written by:

Martijn Barten

Hi, I am Martijn Barten, founder of Revfine.com. With 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry, I specialize in optimizing revenue by combining revenue management with marketing strategies. I have successfully developed, implemented, and managed revenue management and marketing strategies for individual properties and multi-property portfolios.