Travel industry entrepreneur Steve Endacott has added a new business to his directorship portfolio with a focus on hotels.
The Hotel Distribution Consultancy (HDC) will allow him and other industry experts to offer expert advice to leisure hotels looking to increase their direct bookings in the UK or other European source markets.
The former Airtours boss has already forged strategic alliances with a range of UK-focused providers and is in negotiations in other European source markets to extend the consultancy offering to create a multi-source market offering.
He claims an in-depth understanding of the beach hotels sector which he used when leaving former Airtours parent MyTravel in 2003 to create the dynamic packaging On Holiday Group, which carried 600,000 passengers at its peak and created the first Jet2holidays tour operation.
Endacott has also consulted extensively during the last decade for some of the UK’s largest OTA’s and homeworking groups, as well as providing a website and booking platform for easyJet holidays.
He said: “The holiday market continues to evolve, and many hotels now want to increase their mix of direct bookings to improve cash flow, margins and reduce reliance on Booking.com, tour operators or OTAs.
“HDC aims to guide hotels through the nuances of the UK market and to introduce them to businesses that can provide, call centre support, website development, barter-based advertising in exchange for empty rooms, PPC, SEO, metasearch, PR, trade representation, and Instagram brand advertising.
“After 30 years in the UK holiday sector I have an extensive black book of contacts and knowledge of home to best promote hotels across trade, Google, metasearch, and social channels.
“Many hotels are still making very basic mistakes and could do with some local market know-how.”