What’s the most important function of your hotel’s website design? It’s not the aesthetics. It’s not even, ultimately, what guests can learn about you from it. In the end, your hotel’s brand.com website is all about driving direct bookings.
You want potential guests browsing your site to complete the booking process, turn up at the front desk, and check-in. To do this, your site must have a design that is not only appealing, but highly converting.
While the aesthetics and content of your site matter, they’re only tools you’re using to drive conversions. It’s important to make sure they’re oriented to make guests take the steps you want them to take – direct bookings.
With that in mind, here are 5 design tactics helping hoteliers drive direct bookings:
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Choose Between Responsive or Adaptive Design
As people have become more comfortable with making hotel reservations online, sales from mobile devices have soared. Net Affinity’s own data shows that in 2015, 58% of visits to hotel websites were made on mobile, and that number’s growing all the time.
For the travel industry as a whole, Criteo finds that airline and hotel mobile bookings made up 27% of all online bookings during the second quarter of 2016.
The facts above speak for themselves: your hotel site needs to be either responsive or adaptive (or you should consider a separate mobile site solution).
Making your site easy to navigate on all devices increases conversions, because guests can research and book from you with ease. Last minute bookings especially tend to be on mobile, so making mobile bookings as easy as possible is key.
What’s the difference between an adaptive and responsive design? Responsive sites ‘flow’ from one size screen to another. They hide elements and change layouts as needed (and specified in the code) for different devices.
