How to sell an apartment and the individual rooms that compose it both on its website and on the OTA portals
We have often talked to owners of non-hotel accommodation businesses who find themselves wanting to sell apartments or the individual rooms that make up these apartments or villas. This need is much more common than we think, however it is not trivial to manage reservations for these “composite solutions” in a computerized way if the right tools are not used.
Let’s start with a practical example: the villa on the sea …
Our friend Mario is the owner of several holiday homes, including a beautiful villa with sea view consisting of 4 bedrooms (each with private bathroom).
Mario wishes to offer for sale on his booking engine and online sales channels (OTA):
- the entire Villa Marebello
- the 4 single rooms that make up the Villa Marebello.
The priority requirement is that if even one of the rooms in the villa is rented for a given date, consequently for those dates it must no longer be possible to book the entire villa.
An accommodation that therefore has the characteristic of being able to be sold both entirely and separately in the individual units that compose it, we will call it “composite accommodation“.
What Mr. Mario expects is that when the apartment is sold as a “whole solution” this must be sold with:
- a name
- a description
- a price
- a capacity
The same applies to the sale of the individual rooms that compose it, therefore it must be possible to specify the name, description, price and capacity for “each room” that makes up the apartment so that they can also be sold independently.
How to sell an entire apartment and individual rooms simultaneously on different OTA portals
Our friend Mario sells his accommodation on multiple OTA portals including Booking and Homeaway.
To increase reservations, he decides to adopt the following sales strategy:
- On the Homeaway portal (dedicated to holiday homes) it offers the entire Villa Marebello apartment for sale.
At the same time
- On the Booking portal, the 4 accommodations are sold individually (Air, Fire, Air, Earth)
The aim is to offer the customer a range of different solutions, from the sale of the entire villa or from the individual rooms that compose it.
In this regard, it is extremely important to have a software that is able to manage the openings and closings of these composite lodgings since the probability of wrong opening and closing increases as the complexity of the composition of the accommodation increases.
If, for example, a room that makes up the villa is sold for a certain day, then the system will automatically have to close the possibility of selling the entire apartment for that date.
Therefore it is necessary to have a management system that has integrated the channel manager and the booking engine to manage the closure of the rooms and the apartment completely automatically based on the reservations that come from the different channels.
In the image above you can see the example configuration of Mr. Mario, a reservation of the villa automatically closes all the rooms that compose it, while a reservation of a single room closes the villa but leaves open the possibility of reserving the rooms still free.
Manage accommodation and apartments from a single platform with Slope
The need to have a management software that can handle this kind of case is even more important if you choose to sell and distribute on multiple sales channels.
With a software such as Slope it is possible to sell and synchronize the villa on a specific portal for renting villas or apartments and at the same time the individual rooms on a portal more suitable for the sale of accommodation, all this through the channel manager integrated into the platform.
In addition to the sale of accommodation on OTAs, it will be possible to put all solutions on sale on its website through the Slope booking engine.
So from a single platform you can manage even more delicate aspects such as composite lodgings with absolute simplicity, reducing the number of manual operations and at the same time increasing your profits by offering more solutions to the end customer
