What is an Online Travel Agency (OTA) ?

The global landscape for traveling has gone through some extensive changes in the past decade. With robust growth in globalization, removal of several international barriers, and an influx of cross-cultural movement, the world as we see it now in the early 21st century is drastically different than what we saw during the late 20th century. All these alterations have been heavily aided by rapid technological advancements.

In the past, traveling overseas was a drawn-out process that involved managing several different tasks individually in order to prepare for one pristine experience. This included making several calls to hotels asking for reservations and bookings, asking friends and peers for recommendations, hefty planning, and trying to make arrangements for your own accommodation.

Unfortunately, the selections to choose from, and the option to seek professional assistance or advice was limited still. Furthermore, even after exercising so much effort, in the end, all these different tasks in the preplanning procedure would add up to a hectic work schedule even before you set to travel.

This wearisome experience left both businesses and travelers wondering, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was one single platform that could provide all these services altogether?” Recognizing the need for the elimination of such hassle, now we have a solution. This is where travel agencies come into the scene bringing along with it a redefined sense of luxury travel services. 

People nowadays prefer attaining services online. The ease of having services at the tip of their fingers sure beats running from one walk-in agency to another. Online travel agencies bring you advanced digital technology to efficiently deliver all travel-related services to their customers.

What is an OTA?

OTA is simply the abbreviation of an Online Travel Agency. Generally speaking, online travel agencies are digital companies. These OTAs operate via GDS-integrated software to provide a web-based marketplace that allows interactive communication between global travelers and service providers. These services include a myriad of travel essential services such as hotel and flight bookings, finding transportation, restaurant reservations, fun activities such as tours and cruises, and many more such services.

For the first time ever, with the digitization of the travel industry, travel agencies could operate online, enabling travelers to directly interact with service providers and book the services yourself. This is also a reason why Online Travel Agencies are sometimes also known as €œBooking Sites€. OTAs initially mainly offered hotel booking services. But do you wide popularity, they soon started adding other services in their platform such as flights, pick-up/drop-offs, even holiday packages!

OTAs and Hotels

Online travel agencies and hotels now work hand in hand and support each other’s activities. Fundamentally, hotels are required to sign a contract with online travel agencies in order to enlist their names on OTA’s website. There is no limitation regarding the size or type of the hotel, thus, all types of hotels can get their names listed ranging from villas to inns.

Additionally, no fees are required to enlist the name initially but if a hotel reservation is made using a particular online travel agency, the OTA will receive a certain percentage of the price of the reservation.

Good OTA websites showcase their listed hotels in a highly organized and impressive manner by providing detailed information about accommodation costs, amenities, facilities, food, and other services. It will also match search results based on the user’s specifications.

Online travel agency websites are also smart enough to provide additional data that increase the attractiveness of hotels. Such is done by listing names of nearby shopping malls, popular points of interest, and restaurants within close proximity.

However, as a hotel owner, there are a few factors you should look out for before choosing your preferred OTA. While they are great to aid your hotel business from various aspects, you will be presented with a myriad of options to choose from. But first, find out their clientele and target audience.

Some OTAs market towards a specific type of audience such as business travelers. If you own a hotel that is suitable for family vacations, then you will not be benefitted much. You should also consider the set of tools and services they are offering and ensure you will receive optimum support. And lastly, their user interface should be top-notch and user friendly that takes you to the hotel website smoothly with ease.

OTA and Marketing

If you are a part of the tourism industry through your business such as by owning a hotel, restaurant, or by providing transportation, you should definitely consider getting engaged with online travel agencies. This will aid your business and boost your marketing efforts efficiently, in a way that you possibly could not have achieved with your individual strength.

In fact, statistics and trends show that there is a constant upsurge in the use of OTAs as opposed to using independent hotel websites, as much as by 50%.

When first-timers, which is most often the case in terms of leisure travel, plan a trip, they start their research by comparing various hotels in the same location so that they can pick the one that is best suited to meet their requirements. If your hotel’s name does not appear in this list of options, you are automatically losing a good chunk of potential customers.

It is also quite logical that people would prefer services that have received authentic reviews from actual users rather than relying on a webpage that boasts about the services.

Benefits of using OTAs for Marketing

Online travel agencies can greatly foster your marketing efforts and aid your hotel business taking it to heights you could not have managed alone. Some of the prominent benefits you are likely to achieve by collaborating with online travel agencies are:

1. Saving up on investments
   OTAs, just like your company, are also businesses after all. They conduct full-fledged marketing activities in a hundred ways to attract people towards their online marketplace. If your business is listed on their website, you would have an additional source of marketing that will be well taken care of by another company. Thus, it will save both your marketing efforts and costs.
   
   The better news is, online travel agencies just do not stick to one medium of marketing, but rather they conduct activities via various tools such as billboards, television commercials, and sponsorships.

2. Attracting more visitors
   Having your hotel’s presence in both the websites of the online travel agency and your own website already creates a dual presence online for your hotel. Your hotel has a higher chance of showing up in search results.
   
   
   Most people assume that reviews given by online travel agencies are reliable and trusted, with good reason of course. Thus, once they see the hotel’s name enlisted in an online travel agency’s website, they proceed to visit the hotel’s website and make bookings or reservations. This generates more traffic and attracts more end customers.

3. Draw targeted guests
   When potential customers look for hotels online, they often have very specific needs. Such as they may be looking for hotels with a large swimming pool, rooms with a balcony, hotel restaurants offering vegetarian options, optimum room service, and so on. Online travel agencies will filter these questions and provide searchers with a list of the hotels that are tailored perfectly to meet their specific requirements.
   
   Once you capture these guests, the responsibility of providing optimum services to them is upon you. By meeting their specific needs, you can capture a pool of loyal customers who will likely give people recommendations regarding your hotel. This will further drive organic growth through positive word-of-mouth marketing enabling you to encapsulate a large pool of clients.

4. Access to data and advice
   Online travel agencies, by default, come with the tag of having a plethora of data regarding the market. This includes booking trends over time, useful customer insights, basic user information, data about competitors, and other marketing tools that could be hard and costly for you to access otherwise. Using these statistics, you can conduct your own analysis and identify patterns and trends that are of use to you.
   
   Furthermore, these stats will aid you to evaluate your business performance, compare past and present results, and let you compare your performance with industry standards. Apart from all these useful insights, OTAs will assist you with decision making and provide you with useful feedback and recommendations to steer your business in the right direction.

Overview

Running a hotel can be tough on your own but with some aid and support it becomes doable, and what better way to gain support than by collaborating with online travel agencies? OTAs come with a plethora of benefits that will leverage your hotel business and substantially aid in the operational activities. All you have to do is search for the one that best suits your needs.