Booking Window Targeting: what it is and how to use it

Introducing new Booking Window Targeting

Hotelchamp now provides handy booking window targeting options. These options make it easy to automatically trigger offers or campaigns to guests searching for dates a particular number of days in advance. You can now define specific booking windows based on whether the guest’s searched dates are greater than, less than, or equal to a specific number of days in the future.

These options can also be combined with specific date targeting, letting you define specific campaigns and pricing for popular stay dates or offers and incentives for dates with historic low-occupancy.

If you're an existing Hotelchamp customer, you can find more information about configuring your booking window targeting in our help centre.

Using Booking Window Targeting to drive Last-minute direct bookings

Using Booking Window Targeting, you can now set up intelligent offers that automatically sweeten the deal for last-minute bookers.

Guests browsing for last-minute bookings make up a considerable portion of both OTA and brand.com search traffic. In fact, many OTAs market themselves to hoteliers based on this fact, as a way of shifting distressed inventory.

By using booking window targeting, hotels can now directly offer the same sorts of discounts or incentives that these late bookers are looking for. By offering a direct discount to guests browsing just a couple of days before arrival, hotels can offer the same sorts of deals to guests at the cost that they would’ve surrendered in commissions to an OTA for the same booking.

Ultimately, a considerable discount is still more profitable than unsold inventory.

To set up a targeted offer to last-minute searches, simply set the Hotelchamp booking window targeting to:

Booking window is more than: 3 days

AND

Booking window is less than: 6 days

This will then only trigger your offer or campaign when Hotelchamp detects a guest is searching for a last-minute booking. To make your targeting even more accurate, find out your booking engine's default search dates (more information below) and refine the above date window.

Using booking window targeting to exclude default-date searches.

Booking window targeting can also be used to exclude default search values from your targeting. A default search is where a website visitor clicks to check availability but does not manually input any dates. These visitors are likely to be early in their booking process and are simply exploring prices. Without any manual input, clicking ‘book now’ typically defaults to search an arrival date of tomorrow or the day after.

The dates and range that your search function will default to can vary by booking engine, so you'll need to define this first. You can read more in our help centre about how to use booking window targeting to exclude your own default date searches.