One of the metrics hotel suppliers tend to use to measure their efficiency is the look to book ratio. The look to book ratio is the calculation of the number of website visitors divided by the number of visitors who make a booking. Industry averages show that a typical Look to book ratio for a B2C company should be around 19,000 searches per each booking, while B2B customers tend to have a ratio closer to 500 searches per each booking.
Hotel search requests and their responses are routinely exchanged via XML between suppliers, their chosen wholesalers and between multiple intermediaries. This interface or API (Application Programming Interface) enables real-time communication between the travel agents´ portals and the servers of the hotel wholesalers by using XML data, which is interpreted by the different platforms. This allows travel partners to tailor the hotel information, room availability and profit margin to their needs.
Why are hotel suppliers conscience about their look to book ratio?
Besides of being a metric to measure conversions and efficiency of your website, tour operators and bed banks sometimes limit partners to a certain monthly look to book ratio which they need to maintain. The reason is because more searches generally mean more impact on the server resources and infrastructure. This impact can translate into IT costs for the host website.
Will repricing hotel reservations impact your Look to book ratio?
One question Pruvo´s hotel repricing customers frequently ask is how re-shopping their hotel reservations will influence their look to book ratio with suppliers? The answer is, very little. The reason for that is that it´s the broad searches for hotels that takes up a lot of bandwidth and server resources (searching for hotels in a city, or country). However, when Pruvo starts monitoring the price of your existing hotel reservation, we only make 1 API call for a hotel in a specific date.
That said, Pruvo Revenue Maker is completely customizable, so we can also set exact price monitoring rules and restrictions. For example, if you have providers who have a strict limit on your permitted look to book ratio, we can reduce the amount of searches per each reservation.
Conclusion
Re-shopping your hotel reservations will not add a significant amount to your monthly API calls. However, repricing your hotel reservations can significantly increase your hotel booking segment profits by 36% on average, so it´s wise to implement this strategy into your business. Book your free demo with Pruvo and learn how to increase your profitability risk free.