Quality Score & OTAs Visibility: Webinar Takeaways

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There’s no denying that OTAs can provide great visibility to your hotel, making them a necessary tool to increase exposure and ultimately, if you maximize their potential as marketing tools, drive direct bookings.

Several factors can influence your quality score, such as content completeness, the quality of your photos and competitiveness of rates and availability.

Did you miss the webinar? Here’s an overview on what is the quality score in OTAs, the main outcomes of its analysis and a couple measures you can implement right away.

What is the quality score in OTAs?

The quality score is a tool that you can find in the two main OTAs – Expedia and booking.com – that automatically compares rates and availabilities with other OTAs where your hotel is selling.

Booking and Expedia have different algorithms that will make the quality score increase or decrease, according to the rates or availability that you have. Price is a top priority for OTA users so they both prioritize properties with the best rates for specific searches.

It’s essential that you have the same rates on both OTAs, otherwise you can be penalised by one of them without even noticing, if this is something you don’t monitor on a regular basis.

Booking.com and Expedia have the quality score directly connected with visibility: if you have a much lower rate in Expedia, booking.com may penalize you and vice-versa. This means that instead of showing in the first pages – where guests tend to book -, you will be at the bottom pages.

Quality score on booking.com

You can check your quality score on your booking.com extranet by searching for Price Performance Dashboard. To have good visibility, you need to aim to be within the green line – the higher your score, the higher your visibility.

The main factor affecting your quality score is the price you have on other OTAs vs the price you have on Booking.

Quality score on Expedia

You can see it once you login to your extranet. Not only they consider rates and availability compared to competitors, but also guest experience and partner initiated cancellations.

In addition, Expedia considers your content score, meaning the number and quality of the pictures you have uploaded.

Key takeaways:

The higher your quality and content score, the better will your visibility be compared to other properties in your area;
The quality score can always go up if you take either preventive or corrective measures.

What can you start implementing now?

Monitor your quality score on a regular basis – at least once a week;
Your content needs to be up-to-date, compelling and complete;
Don’t create promotions only in one OTA;
Make sure you have the same room and rate plan names, and the same setup of promotions, taxes, restrictions and extra charges in all OTAs;
In the case that what you see on your Extranet is correct but the rates displayed are still different, you should report this issue to your account manager at the channel that is displaying the incorrect rates. If the lower rate is coming from a channel that you do not work with, investigate who is reselling your rooms by searching on the source page or the conditions;
Have the same price across all your distribution channels – if you use a channel manager make sure everything is correctly mapped as incorrectly mapped products can cause unintended price differences;
Differences in inventory can also explain price discrepancies, as different rooms are being compared between channels on metasearch websites. You need to make sure you have the availability for all rooms across all channels.

To learn more about this topic, watch the webinar replay or contact us.

Mahomed Lourenço
Revenue Strategist, GuestCentric

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