The Expedia Extranet: Its Most Valuable Tools Explained

The Expedia network is one of the leading names in the travel industry. One of the reasons behind their success is the host of tools they offer their users. Here’s how the Expedia Extranet can help you to increase bookings, monitor market conditions, and maximize your revenue potential.

As one of the globe’s leading travel marketplaces, you expect that Expedia will offer short-term rental owners the features they need to reach travelers. Enter the Expedia Extranet (also called Expedia Partner Central) — a suite of tools to help you manage reservations and enhance the guest experience.

What’s Expedia Partner Central?

Expedia Partner Central is an intuitive platform that’s home to a number of user-friendly tools that short-term rental owners can use to complete key tasks quickly. It will be the primary channel you’ll use to manage your Expedia listings across the various online travel agencies (OTAs) that form part of the Expedia Group.

Here, you can manage bookings, adjust nightly rates and availability, and streamline inventory management. It also includes a couple of more sophisticated tools like real-time marketing pricing and competitive set analysis.

Combine these different tools with the data insights also provided and hosts will have a much easier time achieving their business goals. Basically, you’ll have everything you need to create and implement an effective revenue management strategy.

Standout Features of Expedia Partner Central

Whether you need help with listing management or guest relationships, Expedia Partner Central focuses on both these key areas. Here are a couple of the standout tools that you can look forward to:

1. Offer strength

This tool highlights any property details that might be missing as well as discrepancies with room rates to gauge how competitively priced you are. It can be used by all types of properties and is useful for evaluating how attractive your property is to travelers. Then, to help you fix any potential issues, it also offers actionable suggestions.

2. Guest experience

This tool helps you to understand the different factors that can impact the guest experience, helping you uncover strategies for how you can improve it and enjoy higher visibility. To do this, it takes into account recent guest ratings and data like your relocation and refund rates. It will also specifically pay attention to cleanliness and amenities, helping you to identify areas where there’s still room for improvement.

3. Revenue management

Rev+ is a free revenue management tool that tracks, combines, and analyzes market data. Armed with these insights, it’s much easier to optimize your rates accordingly.

It also makes it much easier to plan for the future. You’ll, for example, be able to view market occupancy forecasts and see changes in market data.

4. Competitive set

To help with competitor research, you can check out this useful tool. It will compare how your performance stacks up against five to 19 other properties that can be viewed as direct competitors. It will select the properties for you, meaning that the only thing left for you to do is to study the competitive benchmarks.

5. Rooms, rates, and availability

This tool will increase your productivity. It features a bulk update tool that makes it easy to add or change information across multiple room types simultaneously.

6. Property analytics

To help you uncover areas where you can improve, Expedia also offers a number of reports. After all, it’s only once you truly understand your performance that you have a shot at attracting high-value guests.

Included in the analytics are:

• Year-over-year trends
• Net revenue
• How visible your property is on sites part of the Expedia group
• Your success rate of converting property views into paying guests
• Guest value expressed in terms of the average room revenue compared to the previous year and that of your competitive set

It will then also compare your performance to that of your local market.

7. Messages

Similarly to other popular online travel platforms, Expedia also offers an intuitive Messages tool. After a booking was made, either the host or the guest can initiate a conversation. It also includes:

• New message alerts
• Templates
• The ability to add attachments (including images)
• Message scheduling
• Message filtering and flagging

8. In-house feedback

To help you manage guest satisfaction and improve the chances of receiving a five-star review, you can check out the in-house feedback tool.

Here’s how it works:

• Your guest will get an email upon checking in asking them to provide feedback about their stay and amenities.
• Once the guests have shared their feedback, you’ll get notified. You can then thank guests for taking the time to respond and, if they raised any issues, you can use this as an opportunity to share with them how you’ll address it.

9. Post-stay reviews

To help you keep track of, manage, and improve your online reputation, there is Expedia’s post-stay reviews tool. It makes it much easier to manage and reply to reviews by essentially automating guest reviews.

What’s more, it also lets you display these reviews on your own website. This type of social proof can come in handy when you’re trying to attract more direct bookings.

10. TravelAds

Expedia’s Extranet also makes it possible to leverage pay-per-click marketing. Aimed at short-term rental hosts with bigger marketing budgets, it can improve your visibility, helping to grow demand and attract last-minute bookings.

What makes this feature attractive is that you’ll pay only when a traveler actually engages with your property listing. Plus, you can set a custom daily budget, helping you to stay in control of your marketing expenses.

Aside from letting you control your ad spend, it also lets you set parameters for who gets to view your ads. This way, you can target specific guests more accurately.

Then, to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your ad campaigns, it also shares data like views and conversions. This type of data also makes it easier to improve future campaigns.

11. Accelerator

If you don’t necessarily want to invest in paid ads, you can check out the Accelerator tool to help you improve your visibility. It’s a low-risk strategy aimed at properties with limited marketing budgets.

This tool will boost your search result placement, but according to your terms. You get to decide when you want to use it, during which specific time frames, and for how long.

Some short-term rental hosts prefer to use it only when they need to fill empty properties, while other hosts use it for a longer period of time. It’s up to you, but it will take some testing and tweaking to identify what works best for your properties.

Should You Join Expedia Partner Central?

There are two main benefits of signing up to Expedia Partner Central. The first attraction is the potential massive audience and the second is the functionality.

Short-term rental owners that sign up to Expedia can potentially reach millions of travelers each month. According to data shared by Statista, as of March 2023, Expedia was the second-most popular brand for hotel and private accommodation online bookings in the United States. What’s more, it’s also the most popular option for booking online flights.

Aside from the basic tools you need for essential tasks, it also offers marketing programs. Considering that hosts often report that to attract travelers is one of their biggest challenges, this can come in useful and give it an upper hand over other platforms.

How Do You Join?

You’ll first need to create an Expedia account. To do this, visit the Expedia website and follow the prompts.

After creating your account, all you need to do moving forward is to go to the Expedia home page and enter the username or email address that you used when creating the account along with your password.

Contacting Expedia

If you encounter any issues after you’ve logged in successfully, you can contact Expedia Partner Central via your dashboard. You’ll see that there’s a help and support option towards the left.

By clicking on this section, you’ll be redirected to the Expedia Extranet support page. Here, you’ll find helpful resources.

If you can’t find a document that answers your problem, you can reach out to them directly. To do this, simply select the contact us option below “Get in touch”. By clicking on this button, you’ll first be asked to select the category with which you need help before being asked to complete a short form.

An Alternative to the Expedia Extranet

While Expedia offers a solid suite of tools, not all popular vacation rental platforms follow the same example. To help you manage your bookings and build upon the guest experience on other sites, you can check out a tool like iGMS.

Aside from helping you manage multiple properties on Expedia, iGMS can also help you with automated messaging, team management, and detailed reporting. Not only do these tools help you to improve the guest experience, but it also frees up more time that you can reinvest into your short-term rental business.