If there’s one thing we know about at Triptease, it’s online conversion rates. The funnel leading from curious website visitor to satisfied hotel guest is one we spend every day tracking, tweaking and optimising for the thousands of hotels we work with – and we know that some hotels are being held back by a booking engine that’s simply not working hard enough for them.
We’ve aggregated over a million conversion events (i.e. hotel stays booked online) from the last three months of 2017 to see how well leading booking engines are converting your guests. It’s time to see how well yours measures up.
Is your booking engine a conversion machine?
They say that you’re more likely to get divorced than change your bank account – and the same might be true when it comes to hoteliers switching booking engines. Martin Soler recently bemoaned the fact that “it’s 2017, and hotels still use a website paradigm that dates from 2005” – namely, split ‘showcase’ and ‘e-commerce’ sites, often with little continuity between the two. The rise of mobile shows no signs of slowing, and clunky sites ill-suited to a smaller screen aren’t going to do your conversion rate any favours. There’s also the simple fact that all the careful brand-building in the world can be instantly deflated by a frustrating or cumbersome purchasing experience.
If you’re serious about driving direct bookings in 2018, it might be time to reconsider your booking engine. We took a look at the booking engine conversion rates over millions of sessions we tracked from October to December last year – and it turns out some booking engines are doing a far better job than others. While we’re not at liberty to disclose the rates for individual BEs (sorry), we’d recommend checking how your desktop, mobile & blended conversion rates measure up against those displayed in the charts below.
