NB: This is an article from HeBSdigital
While hoteliers invest time and money into digital marketing campaigns to drive traffic to the hotel website, a staggering 98% and more of those website visitors will abandon the booking process without completing the reservation. This is a tremendous waste of precious marketing dollars and missed opportunity to improve the bottom line.
In this multi-channel, multi-device world we live in, travel consumers initiate 17 touch-points before making a hotel booking (Google research).
Acquiring new website visitors is becoming increasingly expensive and difficult in this new environment of flattening or even decreasing website traffic due to Internet saturation, mobile app penetration, and more.
All of this contributes to acquisition costs of a new website visitor to be at least 10 times the cost of retaining existing website visitors (eMarketer).
What can hoteliers do to reduce number of website reservation abandonments?
Reservation Abandonment Applications are a powerful tool in the hotelier’s Book Direct Strategy, aimed at converting website visitors into bookers and enticing visitors who abandon the reservations process with a “come back and complete the booking” promotion. These applications are in the form of:
RESERVATION ABANDONMENT EMAIL:
Send an automated email with a “Come Back and Complete the Booking” promotion or perk to customers who abandon the booking engine with a deep link back to where they left off.
RESERVATION ABANDONMENT LIGHTBOX DISPLAY:
Serve a lightbox display with a “Come Back” or “Book Direct” promotion/perk and marketing message to website visitors who abandon the reservations process or are inactive on the website.
Hotel clients who are using HeBS Digital’s Reservation Abandonment Application Suite experience a lift in conversion rate by over 25%, recovering thousands of dollars of otherwise lost revenue to an OTA or competitor. See how a resort recovered 260 bookings in five months with Reservation Abandonment Applications.
Please read more about HeBS Digital’s Reservation Abandonment Application Suite, a cloud-based application technology enabling hoteliers to fight against reservations abandonment and convert website visitors into bookers.
How Much Revenue Is Your Property Losing From Abandoned Reservations?
To help hoteliers see for themselves just how much lost revenue they could regain with Reservation Abandonment Applications, HeBS Digital has released the Reservation Abandonment Calculator. Here you can see just how much additional revenue your property could generate by increasing your conversion rate by 25%.
Make sure the visit to your property website is the last touch point that converts the travel consumer into your hotel guest.
