Commercial Bedroom Management And Sales

Utilise your bedroom stock for transient business

 

Universities are realising that using their facilities for commercial business is a great way to generate surplus funds. Summer is the most lucrative time as the academic year has finished and the majority of students have moved out. Therefore, the university is likely to have 1000's of bedrooms available, alongside lecture theatres to hold conferences and events in.

Are you thinking about using your bedroom stock commercially, or are you already doing so but looking for a better way?

 

Residential mangement

Challenges you may experience when using student accommodation commercially...

Computer screen

Advertising your bedrooms

As your institution is not a hotel, getting people to realise you open up room availability to non-students can be difficult. It will be down to your team, alongside the marketing department, to raise awareness that your bedrooms can be booked in this way. You'll need to ensure this is advertised through all valuable channels, including your website, and promoted by your conference and event department as a desirable add-on to bookings.

Flexible student payments

Avoiding commission

OTA's are brilliant for exposing you to a huge audience of potential customers. However, if you do secure a booking through them, they will take a percentage of your revenue. Your challenge is to encourage OTA customers to return to you directly for any returning visits, avoiding the commission charge.  

Achieving rate parity on OTA's

If you want to expand your audience reach, then advertising via online travel agents (OTA's) is a great way to do so. However, if you are not using an OTA management platform, you may display different rates on different websites. This could result in you losing out on higher revenue. Additionally, if your management platform doesn't have live availability pushing through, you could risk double bookings. 

Customer satisfaction

It's important to set the expectation of your bedrooms realistically and honestly so that you can deliver to the right audience. Your photos and descriptions must reflect your true offering in order to achieve customer satisfaction. You can then build up positive reviews and encourage guests to return in the future.

Hitting targeted occupancy rates

You set targets on how many rooms you expect to be able to fill, but this isn't necessarily easy to achieve. You need an effective yield management strategy so that you can attract potential customers with tempting offers while ensuring this is the best way to make the most amount of money from the available bedroom stock. Achieving high occupancy rates is the most important and pressured target of the sales team.

Live student room avalibility

Data regulations

There are many data regulations that need to be taken into consideration when dealing with guests personal information. Since May 2018 this became a hot topic for all organisations storing data within the EU. GDPR has affected everyone, e.g. how guest data is kept private and where it is being stored. 

Click the steps and discover solutions for the commercial property management cycle...

Step 1

Computer

Room
advertising

Step 2

Student Experience Software

Room booking management

Step 3

Conference registration software

Online travel agent management

Step 4

Student Experience Software

Guest
management

Step 5

Student Experince Software

Residential data management

Hear what our customers have to say

Noreen O’Malley

General Manager, Conference and Events | University of Limerick

 

As a venue servicing 25,000 bed-nights through online travel agents, we process in excess of 7,500 individual guest reservations in a period of 12 weeks. Prior to the installation of Kx these reservations were processed manually. The introduction of Kx has greatly increased efficiency and displays real-time information to the front of house staff. As well as contributing to a saving in labour, we now have greater control over our bedroom stock and room sales which is invaluable and allows us to grow our business further.

Jane Donachy

Associate Director of Catering Retail and Accommodation | University of the Arts London

 

Over the past few years, we have significantly increased the revenue we generate through the summer business.  Income has grown by almost two-thirds and yet the increase to our team has been minimal by comparison. Kx has enabled us to do this, ensuring we maximise revenue whilst keeping associated admin to a minimum.  Using Kx has also provided us with an opportunity to focus on the guest experience rather than spending our time on manual processes and updating the myriad of spreadsheets we all know and love! Now we not only have more customers but happier ones as well.

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