20 karma · joined April 16, 2011
To achieve this hotels should invest in a decent website, start blogging with a voice that they cultivate over time and go for better rankings in the SERPs. That, plus a humming hotel operation with systems in place to handle the direct business is the way to go.
This way even smallish properties can run circles arround bigger competitors. The bigger hotels have a hard time to copy this, as they are not as agile, and need meetings to figure out a "social media strategy".
Figure I know quite a bit on how to make hotels way more independent of OTAs as a booking source: this is actually the core of my SaaS offering: http://www.igumbi.com . It is an online pms, revenue/ yield management system and has a online booking tool for the hotel website. JSONP based and no sucky flash or iframe.
The most important aspect of the yield management architecture I find to be the use of nesting. It's a very flexible, value based approach on assigning fixed capacties to sellable allotments. This robust inventory algorithm, devised by MIT's Belobaba, is the thing that executes the yiled management settings. And I totally agree with the use of loyalty programs and direct chstomer interaction. That's why we also have a mailchimp list integration, so it becomes virtually a no brainer to keep your mailing list up to date in he daily business operations
By now there is a very active Google Group.Wrote a question yesterday and had an answer within 10 Minutes. Very friendly vibe, mostly Rubyists dabbling into Xcode, but also some very nitty gritty in depth topics.
Also the BubbleWrap repo (https://github.com/mattetti/BubbleWrap) is chugging along nicely, cool for a young project... So, yes: you can get help.