A tripling of website revenue in just two years - the Hafenresidenz Stralsund shows how it's done

Initial situation

Situated in Stralsund's best location, not far from the promenade, you find the Hafenresidenz. The waterfront 4-star hotel was built in 2011 and has 71 rooms in its main building and the "Seemannshus". In addition to the proximity to the beach, guests of the Hafenresidenz take just 5 minutes to reach the old town of Stralsund. Due to the conference facilities, the hotel is also a popular destination for business travelers.

In 2017, no more than 25% of online sales came from the hotel's own website. The site had only low visitor numbers. On the other hand, online travel agencies (OTAs) were the hotel's strongest sales channel, accounting for three-quarters of online sales. There was therefore a need for action above all in the expansion of online direct sales through the Hotel’s website.

Measures

The collaboration with myhotelshop started in September 2018 with the launch of a new website as the first optimization measure. The goal of the new site was primarily to improve user-friendliness. For potential guests, the booking process was to be configured as straightforward, fast and transparent as possible. 

To promote the online visibility of Hafenresidenz, the hotel relied on the use of the most important metasearches: Google Hotel Ads, Trivago, Tripadvisor, and Kayak, as well as the placement of Google Ads campaigns. Effective campaign management, regular monitoring, and the evaluations built on this enabled the campaigns to be optimized in a targeted manner. Consequently, we saw a significant increase in traffic and bookings via the direct website.

In 2020, the hotel started the cooperation with "The Hotels Network" on the recommendation of myhotelshop. The aim of the cooperation was to improve the conversion rate and thus provide another building block for increasing website revenue.

To take advantage of the boom in domestic tourism after the spring lockdown in the "Corona year" of 2020, appropriate strategies were developed and new campaigns such as BING ads were also launched. 

Results

After just one year of cooperation, the share of bookings via the hotel website increased from 25% to 37%. In 2019, the hotel achieved an outstanding 95% growth via its own website. 

But that's not all. In 2020, the Hafenresidenz was also able to take advantage of further improvements. Despite the Corona pandemic, we jointly managed to increase website revenue by 41% and likewise increase the share of direct bookings in total online revenue to 48%.

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This pleases of course hotel director Uwe Colberg:
"myhotelshop has turned out to be an excellent choice and impresses us not only with great personal advice and support, but also with flexibility and industry-specific expertise. In the three years of cooperation, myhotelshop has become a valued partner who has helped us to establish efficient performance marketing. As a result, we were able to significantly increase direct traffic as well as website sales. Especially during the Corona crisis, it became clear how important it is to have a reliable partner with whom you can overcome difficult situations together. We look forward to further cooperation and highly recommend myhotelshop for hotels that want to achieve more in online direct business."

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Conclusion

After two years of cooperation with myhotelshop, Hafenresidenz was able to double its website share and almost triple its website revenue. The costs incurred for direct sales in the process amounted to just 9.5% in 2020 (including all infrastructure costs) and were thus well below the average sales cost ratios of the well-known OTAs.

This enormous increase in online direct sales is, in addition to the effective package of measures, primarily a result of trusting cooperation - and especially for 2020, also a result of the high demand for domestic tourism. 

We consider ourselves fortunate that we were able to accompany and support our customers, especially during this complicated time, and that we can look back on this positive result in the end.