Step Four of the Five Steps of a Guest Booking Process

The most crucial step of the guest booking process yet. This is what Expedia and Booking.com have spent millions on, perfecting this step over the years.
Step 4: BOOKING
This is the booking process.
By this step, you’ve done all the hard work: you have got the bookers attention, you’ve shown them your property photos, the amenities have appealed to them, and you’ve presented your Unique Selling Point.
The guest wants to book and they hit the “book now” button.

What happens next is the deciding factor whether you get that booking, or not.
This is what should happen:
- Guest inputs date of choice
- Guest inputs number of people for the room
- Guest chooses room
- Guest inputs contact information
- Guest inputs card information
- Confirm the booking
This takes 1–2 minutes, max.
The OTA’s have an advantage here because they already have a lot of the data stored in their system, that’s why you log in before making a booking. In fact, even if you’re not logged in when making a booking, they remind you how EASY it is to make a booking if you are logged in!
That is the key here: making your booking process as easy as possible.
HOW EASY IS YOUR BOOKING PROCESS?

OTAs spend millions making sure the booking process is easy as possible.
You haven’t got millions, so what do you do? You use a booking manager’s system. A booking manager is either Free To Book, Evivo, Little Hotellier, High-Level Software etc.
The looks of their booking software should be a crucial part of your decision making when choosing who you go with.
The 3 key elements you need to look for to make sure the booking process is EASY are:
- Make sure it’s setup for mobile devices (I have made this mistake in the past and it cost so many direct bookings).
- Make sure the card entering process is smooth and ideally the guest has the option to pay with PayPal as well.
- The guest doesn’t have to enter loads of unimportant data — you can collect things like their home address, arrival time, etc. at a later date. Right now, it’s all about getting a phone number, email address, name, and card information.
What’s also important is that your phone number is visible at all stages through the booking process. 38% of guests said that they would call a property if they had a question about a future booking, the reason why they don’t is that they can’t find the properties phone number easily when they have a question.
If your booking manager is not doing the above, then you need to have a chat with them to see how they can be.
It could be time to switch if they can’t make that change.
Crack this part of the process and CONGRATULATIONS, you have the booking!

The hard part is about to begin though, BUYERS’ REMORSE.
I’m going to show you some great ways to avoid the dreaded cancellation in the next post.
