Reducing friction in the hotel booking process is a critical strategy for increasing revenue and profitability. By mitigating these friction points, hotels can not only elevate their online reservation experience for customers but also significantly enhance their bookings.
NB: This is an article from Lighthouse (formerly OTA Insight)
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Analytics play a pivotal role in identifying areas for improvement in your hotel distribution strategy, such as reducing operational costs, increasing guest satisfaction, and driving revenue growth.
Adopting a data-driven approach also equips hoteliers to remain competitive and agile in response to market fluctuations.
By leveraging data and analytics, hoteliers can gain critical insights into customer behavior and experiences, enabling them to make informed decisions, streamline operations, and ultimately enhance their financial performance.
While upper funnel friction is beyond the scope of this article, experience shows significant, and readily attainable, improvements can be made by addressing errors at the point of hotel reservation.
Some potential guests will, of course, simply retry. But not all will.
Errors encountered during the making of a reservation will have negative impacts including reduced customer brand perception; poor guest experience; missed opportunities to competitors; and costly and time-consuming manual contingency processes.
Now, let’s take a deep dive into optimizing the booking experience with our Process Blueprint, a cycle of continuous improvement that’s all about identifying errors in your hotel reservation system, categorizing them, fixing issues, checking how well the fix works, and providing ongoing monitoring.
1. Identify and categorize hotel booking errors
First things first, you’ll need to collect data from the hotel reservation system to discover where there might be obstacles during the booking process. Once we’ve got those errors in hand, sort them into different buckets.
This will help you to figure out what’s really causing the hiccups in the hotel booking process and which ones you should tackle first.
Categorizing the errors into different types helps you to understand the root causes of the issues and prioritize them.
Assigning a priority level to each error helps to ensure that the most critical (or most easily fixable) issues are addressed first.
- Collect data from the CRS to identify booking errors.
- Categorize the errors into different types.
- Assign a priority level to each category error based on its impact on the user experience and business operations.
