Due to COVID-19-related safety concerns, more and more travelers today prefer to research and book hotel accommodation online. Do you offer them welcoming, digitized guest experiences when they come to your digital lobby? There are holistic conversion strategies that you can incorporate in your official website and booking engine to bring more travelers from your digital platforms to your hotel rooms.
Read on to learn about the winning tactics that can give you a competitive edge in the hospitality industry.
4 Tips to Help Prepare Tourism Businesses for the Digital Future
1. Target Direct Business
To expand your online visibility, you’ll want to list your hotel inventory on every travel research and booking website available. However, it’s much more profitable to also facilitate direct reservations via an official website and a booking engine. This way, you can avoid paying third-party commissions and improve the bottom line. Similarly, direct bookings let you provide a much more welcoming experience and deliver a great first impression. It’s an opportunity to build better customer relations by giving your guests the information, solutions, and experiences they’re seeking.
2. Capture and Address Crucial Cues From Guests
You’ll want to offer more than just high-quality content, accurate hotel inventory, and competitive pricing on your website. That means your booking engine should also understand and respond to concerns and interests unique to a specific guest at any single time. It should be able to “learn” about traveler’s interests that would previously be captured via call center communication.
For instance, the booking engine should collect information on the guest’s destination, planned date of travel, and the number of people accompanying them. The ability to predict the traveler’s intent or preferences by tracking the pages they’re visiting and offerings viewed is also helpful.
3. Provide Seamless Website-to-Booking Engine Transition
Integrate your website and booking engine to seamlessly share/transfer guest information. The booking engine can present a more appropriate offer when it’s aware of specific customer interests based on their website activity. You may also integrate the online booking tool with your CRM. This integration enables you to distinguish between new and previous travelers based on stay data as recorded on your CRM database. Thus, it becomes easier to display more relevant offerings, likely to result in bookings.
4. Track Conversions and Modify Offerings
The rate of converting website visitors to hotel room reservations indicates the effectiveness of your booking engine. However, you should only be comparing relevant statistics to get your assessment right. For example, conversions from an online travel agency (OTA) promotion don’t compare well with the numbers from the best available rates (BAR) offers on your hotel website. Nonetheless, always track conversion rate improvements for every dollar you spend on a promotional campaign. Also, when the booking platform receives a traveler’s information (interests, requirements, etc.) based on their website activity, it personalizes the offerings, which can increase conversations.
With these customer-centric tactics incorporated into your digital lobby design, you can increase your hotel bookings. Learn about the latest hospitality trends with the California Lodging Investment Conference. Contact us today to find out how this virtual event explores hotel industry insights.
