Online hotel's sales strategies with emphasis on web booking

The purpose of this paper is reflected in the detailed study of world achievements in the context of Information Communication Technology (ICT) development in online hotel sales matching empirical findings which consist of the entire process of designing and setting up rates and sales strategies. Today’s hospitality industry development, in the form of hotel software solutions as well as hotel websites that participate in the sales strategies of individual hotels and hotel chains, determines the business policy of creating a rate with respect to the season, occupancy. One of the biggest challenges hoteliers regularly meet is setting currently valid rates on Online Tourist Agencies (OTA's). The reason is that any rate change must be sent to all these websites at the same time because of rate parity. Case study is based on research planned to explore the frequency of use of ICT in Croatian hotels and their online sales strategy to answer the question of where the Croatian hotels are in relation to global trends in the context of online sales and marketing. The reservation process is dependent on a large number of dynamic parameters. The synchronization process of rate placement with reservation processes depends on a number of variables that need to be considered and matched in real time with the use of the existing programs. Since the OTA's are prevalent because of their financial power to invest in marketing campaigns on the Internet, hotels are forced to cooperate with them in order to be visible. In terms of the exponential growth of online sales, investment in ICT and the use of modern online sales channels are necessary not only to enable a hotel to perform well, but also to enable it to survive on the market. The paper aims to show the importance of the implementation and modernization of the latest software solutions in the hospitality industry.