Thousands of prospective guests are visiting your website every day, but how many of them are actually reaching the booking engine or even completing their booking? At least 80% of those prospects are abandoning the booking engine.
NB: This is an article from Revinate
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Think of your hotel website as a bucket, and potential bookers as water. Water is flowing into the bucket, some of the water is rising to the top, but some is escaping through cracks in the bottom. In the same way, guests are flowing into your website — your booking engine — but some are seeping out, never converting. Your website is leaking guests.
Your mission is to plug those holes so that as many guests as possible complete their booking with you.
Generating attention for your bookings is one step, but making sure that those guests stay and convert is the next priority. With active competition from AI tools, competing hotel sites, and OTAs (projected to make over a trillion dollars in market share by 2030), it is important to use the data that guests leave you on your site. That data is crucial for segmentation and personalization. Good web design is also important for sealing any cracks that might stop people from booking.
Invest in website design and communication to resonate with guests
The display and messaging of your website should feel purposeful, especially on your homepage. Anything you can do to personalize the guest’s web experience can illicit a warmer connection and encourage them to journey through to booking.
Here are some ideas.
Welcome back returning visitors
There are several ways to track website visitors. Popular tools like Google Analytics offer a granular view of criteria, such as traffic and page views. Cookies, website heatmaps, and behavior analytics tools are an easy way to see who viewed your site, from what device, and when, so you can get a pretty good idea of who has their eye on you. Try placing a “Welcome back!” message for these frequent and returning guests. Acknowledging that these guests know about your brand already, and communicating that you appreciate their time and interest, is a great way to nurture a relationship.
Try prompting these returning visitors to check out discounted packages since their last site visit, or simply highlight the benefits of booking in advance. The key is to position any welcome-back strategies to retain interested bookers before they have a chance to leave your website.
Personalize the booking engine
When guests make it to the booking engine, that’s a win! Why? Because now you have access to the data they’ve included for their stay so far. For example, if guests have searched for stay dates or input the number of guests they’re traveling with, personalize and change the booking engine to accommodate that. Prompt single guests with offers for solo breakfast specials or prompt guests with longer trips with length of stay discounts.
