Make your website and booking engine mobile-friendly

One of the primary reasons travelers abandon a booking is because the user experience is too slow and not user friendly. A poor mobile experience could mean your hotel misses out on a lot of last-minute bookings.

More and more reservations are made through mobile devices

Last year, mobile internet usage surpassed desktop usage. As a result, a large portion of users are now using smartphones to look for an hotel and book a travel.

Even though travelers who use their mobile devices to plan their flights and hotels are an expanding demographic, most travelers still complete their booking on a desktop. Only 1 in 5 hotel reservations are now made on a mobile device, but this number is only going to keep growing. Hospitality remains the sector where smartphone bookings are most common, compared to flights or travel packages.

Before booking their stay, most travelers visit the hotel website more than 3 times, through different devices: smartphone, tablet and/or desktop.

If you want to compete for those bookings, you need a mobile-friendly website to drive more mobile bookings.

What should your mobile website look like?

Mobile websites come in two different formats: Responsive and Optimized.

A responsive website responds to the device that is being used to view it. It’s the same website as the desktop one, however it loads differently depending on the mobile device. This is a good option if you want your website to be consistent across desktop and mobile platforms. If you want to go one step further, you can think about developing an optimized website: a website completely different from your desktop version. It can still contain a lot of the same information, but can be customized for mobile visitors giving them an even better user experience.

One type of mobile website is not better than the other. It all depends on your property and your preference.

Make your website mobile-friendly for Google

It’s important that your website includes as much information as possible without impacting load times.

Your Google SEO won’t be affected whether you choose to develop a responsive or optimized website. Your mobile website just needs to provide a positive and intuitive user experience:

• Content (visuals, texts…) should be the right size to fit on a mobile screen and should load quickly. Users shouldn’t have to zoom or scroll across to view the content,
• Links and buttons should be placed far enough apart so guests can easily select the desired one,
• Specific features should be displayed for mobile device, like click-to-call to contact the hotel in one click or Google Maps integration to allow travelers to see the location of the hotel and guests to find their way back to your hotel,
• Booking process should be smooth and easy.

Website and booking engine

You want as many customers as possible clicking on the ‘book now’ button within your booking engine. For this to happen you need to ensure your mobile website design prioritizes prominent calls-to-action. Visually appealing images and textual content is important in making sure guests are interested enough to click on your booking engine. If your website is mobile-friendly but your booking engine is not, or vice versa, it will be a jarring experience for the user. It looks unprofessional on your part and makes it difficult for the traveler to enter their reservation.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, we can help you create a new responsive website for your hotel, giving your customers a great user experience whatever the device they use: desktop, tablet or smartphone.