ISTANBUL – Hotelbeds, the B2B bedbank, has today provided at MarketHub Europe event, which takes place this week in Istanbul, an update on the non-domestic bookings that its B2B sales platform offers to its European hotel partners.
Hotelbeds can confirm that 86% of its bookings for European destinations are non-domestic. Additionally, 28% of its European hotel reservations currently come from non-European, long-haul source markets, up from around 25% in 2018.
This growth in international tourists arriving to Europe can be mainly attributed to a 40% year-on-year increase in reservations for Chinese tourists via Hotelbeds, with China now ranking as Hotelbeds’ sixth biggest source market to Europe.
Carlos Muñoz, Hotelbeds Managing Director, said, “We have always been able to offer our European hotel partners a very high and steady proportion of non-domestic bookings and within that a significant part has always been from long-haul, non-European source markets, such as the United States, Japan and Middle East."
“Not only do these incremental bookings complement a hotel’s distribution mix, it also provides them with guests that typically pay a higher rate, cancel less, stay for longer, spend more at the hotel and even come back more often – such as tour operators, retail travel agents, airline websites and loyalty and reward points schemes – in other words, high-value reservations. This is even more so the case with the long-haul bookings as they typically stay much longer and spend much more."
“But now the boom in Chinese visitors is increasing the percentage of non-European bookings even higher. We can confirm today at MarketHub in Europe that we’ve worked hard over the last few years to raise awareness with our European hotelier partners on how to best attract Chinese travellers to their hotel, advising them on points such as not just language, but strategies such as social media, payments and even Chinese travellers’ tastes.”
Currently a total of 180,000 unique hotels globally are available on the Hotelbeds system and a majority of the hotels are directly contracted under exclusive terms and conditions. This growth has been driven by the renewed focus of Hotelbeds in providing its hotel partners with incremental bookings via its network of 60,000 travel buyers from both non-domestic source markets and B2B buyers – including tour operators, retail travel agents, airline websites and loyalty and reward points schemes.
Reservations made via the B2B offer hoteliers high-value guests that typically book earlier, pay more, cancel less, stay for longer and spend twice as much in the destination.
The MarketHub Europe event is an invitation-only, three-day event attended by some of the most important Hotelbeds partners from all the key markets across Europe. Attendees are senior executives and decision makers from tour operators, airlines, loyalty and point redemption businesses, leading travel agency chains and online travel agencies.
A key and regular industry fixture since 2009, MarketHubs are one of the leading events for bringing the travel industry together, with eight previous events held in the Americas, five in Europe, and one in Asia. The first MarketHub Europe was held in Seville back in 2013 and since then Hotelbeds has held the event in several top Spanish destinations, such as Tenerife and Ibiza.
The MarketHub Europe event kicked-off with a cocktail dinner on the Tuesday evening, with the Wednesday and Thursday featuring a conference and trade show by day and exclusive entertainment by night.
Tags:Hotelbeds
