The two Cs that are often referred to in e-commerce are content and conversion, we may put them together and say: Good content that leads to conversion is king.
For hotels, the easier part of the task of customer acquisition is getting eyeballs to your website. Major brands like Hilton and Marriott have driven large gains in website traffic and sign-ups to their loyalty programmes in recent years thanks to major advertising campaigns. Of course, getting them there is only half the work.
Converting lookers into bookers is where the rubber hits the road. If properties can’t convert visits to their booking channels into heads in beads — after paying significant marketing costs or brand and franchise fees — the unit economics will be very unfavourable very fast. This is where your focus should be.
Industry data shows that the bulk of lookers do not convert to bookers. According to our friends at 80 DAYS, conversion rates for hotel websites average between 1.7% and 2%. This means even in the best-case scenarios, where a hotel might be seeing a 5% conversion rate, 95% of visitors are still abandoning its website without booking a room.
Another report – the Adobe Digital Index – reflects similar statistics. For travel products, the conversion rate in Asia Pacific on desktop is 2.7%, and on mobile devices, it is 0.9%.
In Asia, e-commerce is still very much on the uptake. Interestingly, mobile commerce is showing keen promise. Last year, for China’s Singles Day — when shoppers spent more than $33 billion in 24 hours — 70% of purchases were made on mobile devices, showing that mobile shopping is fast becoming the preferred choice online for many Asian markets.
Much research has been done on why shoppers abandon carts and why visitors just look and don’t book. As such, there is definitely enough data and analytics out there to help us get better conversion rates.
