Why do you need an Online Travel Agency (OTA)?

Rosen Mart works to deliver your hotel business to all levels of guests. Rosen Mart takes the utmost care to protect privacy and control the listing of your property as a partner on OTA. Examples: Expedia, Booking.com and Tribookin.com etc.

Working with an Online Travel Agency (OTA) not only helps you reach more travelers globally, it allows you to engage them when they’re researching, planning and booking their next trip. Discover how they work, what tools they offer and how to choose the right one for your business.

An online travel agency (OTA) is a web-based marketplace that allows consumers to research and book travel products and services, including hotels, flights, cars, tours, cruises, activities and more, directly with travel suppliers. Every day, millions of travelers around the world use OTAs to plan leisure and business travel.

OTAs provide access to your potential guests in locations and at volumes that would be difficult for you to access through your own marketing efforts. Additionally, OTAs provide market insights and tools for targeting travelers, securing and processing bookings, communicating with guests and managing reviews.

Hotels of all sizes–including bed & breakfasts, inns and ryokans–sign contracts to list their properties on an OTA. There are no upfront fees to list rooms in the marketplace. OTAs make money only when rooms are booked, collecting a percentage of the total value of each secured reservation.

The OTA provides opportunities to showcase rooms and properties through amenity descriptions, photos, nearby points of interests and more. Listings are displayed to travelers searching for places to stay in your destination. If they use filters to narrow their search—e.g. only looking for pools, free Wi-Fi, or air conditioning—the OTA will align travel criteria with the detail provided by the hotel, displaying the properties that match best.

The OTA provides a secure booking platform and is the traveler’s main point of contact for booking amendments and cancellations. At no cost, OTAs provide a variety of tools—from real-time access to market data to tools for managing reviews—to help their partners be successful.

OTAs are increasingly popular. In fact, travelers today use OTAs 50% more than hotel websites to compare leisure travel options. And that means OTAs can play an important part in your distribution strategy.

Here’s why hotels like yours are choosing to use OTAs.

Online marketing investments you don’t have to make

Every year OTAs spend millions of dollars attracting consumers from around the world to their online travel marketplaces. Their investment in on online and tv advertising, billboards and sponsorships, social media and other marketing channels helps hotels to engage hard-to-reach travelers they couldn’t afford to reach otherwise. OTAs give you a low risk opportunity to grow your business, especially if you have limited marketing funds.

Greater visibility for your own website

Evidence shows that being listed on an OTA can bring more traffic to your property’s own website, because consumers often use OTAs for their search before booking directly. This is known as “The Billboard Effect”.

A 2011 study which looked at consumers’ online pre-purchase behavior found that around 75% of people who made direct reservations with a major hotel brand had visited an OTA website before booking directly with the hotel. Another report in 2017 showed that the “Billboard Effect” still occurs, as many people still visit an OTA prior to booking direct.