A Study On The OTA Marketing Strategy Of Vansana Riverside Hotel,LAO PDR

OTAs or online travel agencies offer various convenience by matching the different preferences of consumers to declutter their decision making process.Therefore,hoteliers rely on this channel as a part of their marketing strategy to gain more exposure and reservations.The following document studies the OTA Marketing Strategy of Vansana Riverside Hotel,Vientiane Capital,Lao PDR.This paper is a thorough analysis of the research background and current status of the hospitality industry,together with the proposal of the OTA management plan that is recommended to be executed in the hotel in the near future.The following research is designed to help understand how Vansana Riverside Hotel manages its OTA reservations,in order to facilitate growth in the increasingly competitive environment.It examines the different possible influential factors,managerial challenges in determining the marketing and management of the three partnering OTAs(Agoda.com,Booking.com and Expedia.com)in a beneficial way.The innovative idea is that,the research does not just focus on a single point of view regarding OTAs.Most researches out there have been done about the consumer behavior of users towards OTAs,or how hotels react to the growing power of the OTAs over the industry.This paper however,looks at how it is useful to utilize these channels and seek ways to understand how Vansana Riverside Hotel can strike a balance in order to ensure relationships between various existing distribution channels remain positive or make greater improvements.It is also targeted to evaluate the potential improvements and impacts of OTAs management in the hotel as an organization.Although in most scenarios,the job to solve regarded issues is of the marketing department,the researcher looked into how the hotel's operations affect its overall efficiency and productivity.The way their organization is structured,the various levels of bureaucracy and authoritative rights have all made many components of their operations unnecessarily troublesome.In the hotel,the main responsibility for the marketing department is to deal with all the hotel's marketing campaigns,advertisements,room reservations and cancellations.Furthermore,they were also supposed to be in charge of contract deals with partners including offline tour agencies,organizations,OTAs,as well as to ensure the overall guest experience and relationships.Nevertheless,the research has been able to observe that in order to be effective,the marketing department cannot be isolated to do the job alone.So far,the department has met with many difficulties while trying to do their tasks.It has been found out that the most distinct issues that the department has to constantly deal with concerned several aspects.Even though the room inventory on the various channels of distribution is managed by this department,the decision power to make any amendments is not given to them.Thus,this has caused late delivery of information to potential customers and resulted in problems,consisting of over-booking or loss of potential sales.Additionally,the hotel's relationships with their online partners have also been observed to not be at the best state.Their unsystematic room distributions has raised concerns and induced a specific platform's perception of unfairness when an OTA is seen to have available rooms for sale,while the other has no more rooms in their inventory.Another significant issue was how the slowed-down process of responses of the marketing department affected the level of guest satisfaction and also with the hotel's partners.The need of getting prior approval to all responses and actions decreased the speed of providing solutions to their customer 's problems.Hence,it had caused those guests to find that the hotel does not value their experience.In several cases,particularly customers who reserved via the OTAs,those complaints would not reach the hotel directly,but through those companies.Therefore,the communication becomes more complicated.The marketing strategy optimization is the aim through the solution of the mentioned issues,where the theories such as the 7Ps,4Cs of marketing,and marketing positioning and segmentation methodologies gained from the discipline of business administration will be integrated as a combination.Strategic approaches like the PESTEL analysis is used to better understand the external environment the business is facing and.SWOT is used to study its internal environment.The findings in addition with the application of the best practices,methods and available technologies will enhance and boost the marketing and strategic benefits.Suggestions,such as segmenting the customers into various groups to narrow down the expected needs of each group and identify channel distributions,pricing,after-sale customer services will be provided.Implementation plans will be provided for the management,human resource and technological support to enable a smoother flow of operations while attempting to optimize their practices.The overall conclusion will be shown along with the difficulties met throughout the conduct of the research,as well as directions for further research.