3 Trends Your Hotel Should Know About for Summer 2021
This summer has been one busy season already for the hotel and travel industry. With so many people stuck at home in 2020, everyone has been eager to get out and travel — whether it be visiting family and friends that they haven’t seen in a while, or taking advantage of a luxurious vacation. The hotel industry is booming and we’re here for it!
Check out these top three summer trends for hotels.
1. Cost-saving strategies
Most properties were seeing record highs in 2019 and early 2020 before COVID put a halt on travel. Most hotels are predicting that they’ll be back to 2019 numbers by the end of 2022, but that’s reliant on how well the operations are with their cost-saving strategies.
Some of the bigger strategies we’ve been seeing hoteliers implement have been direct bookings and communication, removing third-party companies who typically take a commission cut for themselves. With that being said, ensuring that your website, along with your online marketing and advertising strategies, are in top shape will certainly help put you ahead of your competitors.
In addition, implementing sales and catering software that will help to streamline your group booking process will be instrumental in increasing your sales. Tripleseat for Hotels not only helps to streamline the booking process for sales managers, but it also helps you book more sales, quicker and more efficiently. It also has an integrated CRM and custom lead form that will make the communication process easier and more direct (and it’s more cost-effective than most sales and catering software out there).
2. Vaxications
Now that you have your communication, sales, and catering in a good place, it’s time to get creative with your marketing offers. We’re also seeing an increase in “vaxications,” vacations planned after individuals and families are fully vaccinated. Some people are planning long, luxury vacations.
In the past, you’d find people scrambling out of the office on a Thursday, squeezing in long weekend vacations with their friends and family. Now that people have spent so much time at home, they’re seeing the value in work-life balance and taking those beautiful trips. Putting together extended stay deals for groups is a great addition to your sales-building strategy.
3. Bleisure travel
Since we’re talking about extended stay, luxurious vacations, it’s only fitting to bring up the popular bleisure trend that’s becoming a thing in the United States and beyond. Priceline reported that packages like workcation packages or bleisure trips, grew by 165% in 2020, most certainly due to the number of remote workers and the desire to escape their homes during COVID. But as a lot of companies have become fully remote, or more flexible with remote working, we’re seeing that this trend is here to stay, at least for now.
Forecasting a successful summer for hotels
The most encouraging thing we’ve seen this summer were the results of a consumer study recently released by Tripleseat. We asked 500 consumers about their travel plans for the remainder of this year, from business to leisure, how often they travel, and where they plan on staying.
We even got some insight on group bookings and business travel which was very promising in terms of the continued growth in sales for this year. Take a peek at our findings, and continue to stay creative when it comes to your marketing — for both consumers and corporate clients.
Want to capture more of the summer travel market? Tripleseat is a cloud-based sales and catering management platform that enables hotels to book group business faster and streamline their booking process. Schedule a demo with us today and we can show you how awesome Tripleseat really is.
