Do you want to get more reservations on your own booking engine and get higher profit margins?
Here are a few tips to keep in mind to increase the number of your direct booking.
Have an attractive website
When searching for a hotel, travelers, especially millennials, check an average of 10 websites before making a purchase. That’s why you need to make sure that your hotel website is compelling enough to encourage a direct booking and that it’s easy for users to get the information they need.
A hotel website with great design, high-resolution photos and videos, user-friendly experience, clear display of command buttons like Book Now and Gallery, will make a good first impression on travelers and will help to improve the conversions.
In addition, be sure that your website is optimized for mobile usage. A mobile-friendly website will help you to have better score in SEO. A study from Google reveals that in the past few years, conversion rates have grown more than 80% on a mobile travel site. This means that more and more people are making decisions through their smartphones or mobile devices. You can check if your website is Mobile-Friendly here.
Last but not least, don’t forget your presence in social media like Facebook. Today travelers go to different social channels to do a survey before they decide to book a hotel. Having a direct booking engine installed on your hotel Facebook page can also increase the number of your direct booking.
Have the best rates and offers on your website
Travelers will visite many sources, including OTAs (Booking, Expedia…), online review websites (TripAdvisor…) and hotel websites before booking a room. So, once a potential customer lands on your website, you have to give him some good reasons to book live.
A survey conducted by Software Advice with 2,500 travelers revealed that 48% of visitors of a hotel website would probably book live if they are offered a free supplement. You can think about offering a free breakfast or a discount to encourage their booking.
The most important is to grab the attention of your visitors fast, using calls-to-action or pop-ups to alert them about a special offer or a cheaper rate on your hotel website. Highlight your offers directly on your homepage and link immediately to your own booking engine to accelerate the reservation. You can also promote your offers on your social pages, and thus, drive traffic to your website.
Make your customers more confident
96% of travelers consider guest reviews important when searching for a hotel.
79% of travelers will read between 6 and 12 reviews before selecting their hotel and most of them will filter out hotels with an average star rating below three.
If you want to encourage direct booking and increase your revenue, it is essential that travelers who visit your website and social pages can see reviews from other guests.
The more they will trust other customers, the more they will want to book directly on your website.
So as to do so, you can easily implement on your website a module that will display reviews of the guests who stayed at your hotel. Then you will reassure your potential customers and make them confident to book on your website.
Maybe now it’s the right time to redeem your website and social pages.