Each direct booking through your hotel website and booking engine represents the opportunity to bring in more revenue and usually from a preferred channel. At Simplotel, we believe that optimising conversions on your hotel website requires doing a myriad of small things correctly — almost like death by a thousand papercuts. In this blog, we'll explore how Simplotel Hotel E-commerce takes into account all these factors to significantly enhance conversion rates and increase direct bookings in the range of 2-10x for its customers.
 

Fast load time for your hotel website & booking engine

We believe that the load time of your website & booking engine is the only silver bullet in hotel e-commerce! A faster hotel website, or any website for that matter, not only improves user experience but also attracts more search traffic. Guests are more likely to engage with and convert on a fast-loading hotel website & booking engine. Studies have shown that Google rewards faster sites with better rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs), thereby improving your search engine optimisation (SEO).
 

Synchronising your hotel website & booking engine

We ensure that your hotel website and booking engine are in sync to provide a seamless experience for the guest. We also ensure personalisation. For instance, if a guest interacts with the booking engine, we also ensure that the selected dates are reflected on the website. This streamlines the booking process and increases conversions. For more information, learn how we create synergy between your website and booking engine.
 

Displaying prominent call-to-actions (CTAs)

We ensure that your CTA buttons have the right labels, are above the fold and they don't compete with other elements on the web page or booking engine.
 

Showcasing unique selling points (USPs)

We ensure that your CTA buttons have the right labels, are above the fold and they don't compete with other elements on the web page or booking engine.
 

Creating a sense of urgency

On your hotel website and booking engine we implement conversion-boosting strategies similar to online travel agencies (OTAs) like MakeMyTrip or Booking.com. Some of these features are strikethrough (hidden) pricing and scarcity messages that entice guests to book faster, to ensure that they do not miss out on a great deal.
 

Leveraging remarketing

An Expedia study revealed that a guest will visit at least 38 websites on average before deciding on where to stay. Therefore, in travel, the leading OTAs like Booking.com, MakeMyTrip tend to use remarketing to continuously remind customers on bookings and abandonments to entice the customers to resume their booking journey.

With Simplotel Hotel E-commerce it is possible for hotels to do remarketing at no additional cost, and replicate the marketing capabilities of OTAs. Along with emails and SMSes, hotels can now also use WhatsApp to recapture 2x more abandoned bookings.
 

White-labelling your hotel booking engine URL

We believe white-labelling your hotel booking engine URL is a must because the guest experience is much more seamless and credible when the hotel brand website and booking engine are on the same domain. Did you know that if your booking engine still loads on a third-party domain, it could cost you bookings?
 

Offering multiple options of payment

‘Pay at Hotel’ (without a credit card), ‘Pay at Hotel’ (with a credit card), ‘Partial upfront payment’, and 100% upfront payment are the four options of payment. The more payment options you offer, the more you encourage guests to book directly on your booking engine. With the Simplotel Booking Engine, hotels can now choose the best of all these to drive more direct bookings and also set these options based on occupancy, day of week, etc.
 

Choosing the right payment gateway

Choosing the right payment gateway is crucial towards driving more conversions. Here are the reasons and tips on how hotels can choose the best payment gateway.
 

Effective analytics

With Simplotel’s analytics, you can now gain insights into guest behaviour. Knowing what guests are searching for, their advance purchase patterns, length of stay data, and identifying search failures can help you make informed configurations at our backend to drive more conversions. We also take a more proactive approach where we send daily mailers to our customers on these metrics.
 

Optimising for mobile devices

According to studies online, over 55% of website traffic comes from mobile devices and over 92% of these users access the internet using a mobile phone. Therefore, it is vital that your hotel website and booking engine is optimised for mobile.

In conclusion,these are just a few of the myriad techniques that we use to help our customers grow their direct bookings. Conversions on your hotel website and booking engine result from a multitude of strategies, each contributing incrementally to the overall success of a booking. By implementing around 50 strategies that each improve conversion rates by 1-2%, we have helped hotels achieve a remarkable 2-10x growth in direct bookings.