Getting customers to your hotel’s website is one thing. Converting their clicks into bookings is quite another.
According to Sam Weston, marketing manager for 80 DAYS, conversion rates for hotel websites average between 1.7% and 2%. (If you’re looking at anything higher than that, you’re doing great.) But even in the best-case scenarios, where a hotel might be seeing a 5% conversion rate, 95% of visitors are still abandoning.
The good news is, the majority of visitors who abandon a booking are not lost for good. It’s more likely these visitors want to shop around. (According to a recent statistic by SaleCycle.com for the travel industry, the top three reasons for booking abandonment are around research, price comparison and checking with other travelers.)
Even so, hotels can do more to lower the rate of abandonment.
Duetto’s Gabriela Guevara, Regional Director of Customer Success & Strategic Consulting, attributes the industry’s low conversion rates to slow load times, designs that are not mobile first, poor site user experiences, insufficient content and confusing offers. Weston agrees, adding these additional reasons for why hotels might have low conversion rates.
- Risk/Investment. Booking a hotel stay, especially for a longer period of time, is not often a spur-of-the-moment type of decision. Many guests shop extensively before booking. “If you purchase a t-shirt for $40 and it turns out to be of poor quality, that’s not the end of the world,” says Weston. “But if you book a hotel stay for $400 and it’s a poor experience, you are far unhappier about that investment. Guests tend to spend a lot of time researching and shopping.”
- Choice and Information Overload. If hotels want to win the booking war, it’s critical to know how to differentiate from the competition. “There are 1,081 hotels in London, for example,” says Weston. “For you to sell a room at your hotel you need to have a better overall proposition than a thousand other hotels. And you need to make that very clear on your website.”
