As the travel planning journey continues to become increasingly more complex, hoteliers need to be looking for more impactful ways to engage and retain their best potential guests. Today’s typical online travel consumer is exposed to over 38,983 micro-moments in any 60-day timeframe, during which time they visit an average of 18 websites via multiple devices in eight sessions before making a hotel booking (Google).
Hotels are not just competing with OTAs, their competitive set, and Airbnb—they are also competing with every micro-moment that distracts the travel planner, such as emails, text messages, video, and social media feeds. There is some serious competition out there for the travel consumer’s attention, making it all the more important to engage and convert them while they are visiting the property website. A key imperative for hoteliers in 2018 is preventing these travel planners from becoming distracted by digital noise and serving them content at the correct time in order to convert them into bookers.
Why is it important to improve website conversion rates?
The average hotel website conversion rate (bookings divided by unique monthly visitors) is typically below 2%. For example, imagine 100 people visit your hotel website. Out of those people, less than two will complete a booking, and more than 98 will look around before leaving to make a booking elsewhere—either with your competitors or with the OTAs. Hoteliers are spending precious advertising dollars on SEO, paid search, online media, PR, and social media in order to bring users to the hotel website. However, 98% of them are not converting.
Now imagine the monetary benefit from improving the conversion rate from a property with an ADR of $200, a website with 25,000 unique monthly visitors, and 1.5% conversion rate. If conversion rate increases by 25%, this will result in additional website revenue of $37,500 per month. A 33% increase will bring an additional $50,000 per month.
