Marta Romero1

📃 Analyzing hotel demand requires looking beyond successful bookings to consider lost opportunities, emulating the WWII Allied bombers' "survivorship bias" solution, as per Abraham Wald's realization. KPIs like generated bookings, cancellations, and unconverted demand, when fully scrutinized, offer a complete picture of a hotel's real demand. Effective strategies include adjusting restrictions, optimizing inventory, monitoring conversion rates, ensuring competitive pricing, and launching timely promotions. Maximizing existing demand before seeking new leads can significantly enhance sales and profitability without extra costs.

🏨 Hotels don't generate demand; their role is to capture demand through effective strategies. Destinations, tour operators, airlines, and media are key demand generators, with media influence growing due to social networks and "screen tourism," which moves about 100 million tourists annually. Hotels compete with OTAs and metasearch platforms to attract this demand. OTAs have limited demand-generation capacity, emphasizing the importance of hotels maintaining attractive products, reputation, competitive prices, and visibility to capture demand. Direct sales strategies include understanding customers, aligning products with expectations, managing online reputation, competitive direct channel pricing, promotions, targeted marketing campaigns, constant visibility, careful availability management, and analyzing real hotel demand.