The Grand Dragon Hotel Ladakh, located at a height of 11,562 ft. in Leh, Ladakh in the Himalayas, holds a place of pride in the hearts of the locals as it was the first international class hotel in this remote and isolated outpost.
The Grand Dragon Hotel Ladakh, located at a height of 11,562 ft. in Leh, Ladakh in the Himalayas, holds a place of pride in the hearts of the locals as it was the first international class hotel in this remote and isolated outpost. Set up in 2007, this hotel, built despite the challenges of being located at a high altitude, redefined hospitality in Leh and set a benchmark for other establishments that came up subsequently.
Revenue acquisition and growth: To promote visits to Ladakh round the year, and foster growth in ARRs in the process.
Visibility: To establish it as a premier property in Leh on OTAs.
Maintain high OTA ranking
Promote ‘off-season’ (winter) travel
Seasonal variations at the property’s location: Owing to the extreme weather conditions in winters, Ladakh tourism flourishes primarily during the summer months (June-September), thus, difficult to establish the destination as a tourist spot in winters.
Bookings for Ladakh are generally made well in advance, so competitor analysis is not possible for pricing strategies.
The hotel had the highest inventory in Ladakh which made it a herculean task to provide maximum occupancy without compromising with the rates.
The brand image had to be taken into consideration while designing strategy, thus, not allowing us to lower our ARR as per prevailing competition in Ladakh.
Setting up the Online Travel Agents (OTAs) with the right Look to Book ratio in mind
By creating picture and video content to showcase the hotel on all the OTAs and by setting up rate strategies we created an interest about the property among all leading OTAs. From absence on the major OTAs like MMT, GoIbibo, Booking.com, Expedia, we established a prominent ranking within a year of initiation.
OTA Ranking Management by improving content score (which took a lot of time and effort!)
The team conducted regular audits comprising of regular profile updates, fresh images upload, and up to date information, which led to increase in quality score of profiles, room nights and revenue from online channels, thus improving the OTA ranking.
Dynamic rate management
Based on occupancy, we took care of ARR and the demand to ensure that the hotel witnessed maximum look/book.
Pricing Strategy
We continuously audited the effectiveness of Pricing Strategy by checking the room night pickup, rates & packages. Also, we followed a Predictive Pricing Strategy approach by analyzing the cyclical & seasonal trends from the past years, and forecasting for the upcoming months. It helped us formulate suitable ARR, predict the length of stay (LoS) and create new offers on OTAs, on the website and for the call centers.
Reputation Management
While all this was happening, one more major challenge was to maintain the ARR and increase the revenue, we ensured good reviews and proactive response strategy in case of any concerns raised by guests. This helped maintain a strong brand position in the eyes of the prospective guests, thus, they did not mind paying a premium price.
We were pleasantly surprised at how agile and creative the team at UP were. They were very positive throughout a very challenging project and bursting with great ideas. We have achieved a unique web application and will be using Up again in the near future.
Robert Macgregor – Operations Director
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