A Guide to Improving the Online Hotel Guest Experience
Supercharging the User Experience of Booking a Hotel Directly in a Crowded Market of Online Travel Agents
The Customer Experience
The evolution of digital technologies has completely transformed consumer shopping behaviour. This change in consumer trends has prompted organizations to adapt to the way they interact with their customers. The customer experience (CX) is considered the interaction a consumer has with a brand and its physical and digital environment. Creating an excellent online experience for your users has never been more critical than it is in today’s digital world, helping brands to develop a positive relationship with their customers.
The development of innovative technologies such as mobile devices, wearables, apps, artificial intelligence and augmented reality has created a new type of modern-day buyer, who’s multi-channel, digitally adaptive and constantly influenced by social media. The opportunities that have arisen from using modern technology has allowed consumers to purchase products 24/7, instantly available and open for business.
Digital Travel and Customer Experience
The travel and tourism industry is often considered high risk to consumers as purchasing a travel product such as a holiday or booking a room is only experienced upon consumption. Travel purchases are often highly priced, further heightening the risks to consumers. Creating an exceptional customer experience for travellers through multiple channels can significantly reduce an individuals perceived risks to purchasing a holiday or booking a hotel room, helping to increase conversion rates and drive brand loyalty.
“81% of consumers prefer to book and pay for their holiday online.”
The rise of digital travel has provided consumers with an abundance of information sources available to them online including blogs, websites, apps and online travel agents. This mass of information allows individuals to process and disregard information at an alarming rate and curate their travel purchases perfectly to their needs. Consumers have now become their very own travel agent, with 81% of individuals preferring to purchase their holiday online. The rise of online travel agents have impinged on this sector, hoping to take advantage of the growing online travel industry.
Online Travel Agents and Hotels
Online travel agents such as Expedia, Last Minute and Opodo aim to provide a convenient way for customers to compare flights, hotels and holidays through one easy to use online platform. On average a consumer spends time browsing 38 online travel agents before making a purchase, OTAs are often considered more trustworthy as they have a strong and well-known presence online. Adding to it the perceived discounts, best prices and ease of comparing hotels and holidays through a single platform has seen OTA’s become popular amongst users. This has made it increasingly challenging for hotel brands differentiate themselves from OTAs and the competition and ensure that consumers purchase from them directly.
This week on Medium, we discuss how hotel brands can supercharge their user experience of booking a hotel room directly in a crowded market of online travel agents.
Mobile Optimised
Consumers are now continually switching between devices, fluidly adapting between desktop, tablet, mobile, wearables and smart speakers during their travel shopping journey. However, most users still prefer to book their travel hotel rooms via desktop, perceiving it to be more user-friendly and secure than mobile. While 40% of travellers research flights and accommodation on their mobile, this drops to 21% when it comes to booking. Brands need to ensure that their omni-channel shopping experience is seamless for their users, allowing them to pick up from where they left off within their shopping journey on any device.
Hotel and Room Photography
The intangible nature of travel and tourism means that customers rely heavily on images of the hotel, rooms and amenities the hotel provides. Therefore, providing high quality, detailed and extensive photos of a hotel is vital to help boost sales. Our research found that there was a 15% increase in conversion rates when hotels used high quality images and more importantly, images that showed every room type, compared to when low quality or minimal photos were used. Adding imagery to your hotel website helps increase trust within the brand and reassure the consumer during the purchasing process.
Google Search Adverts
Google search ads are a great way to help drive user traffic directly to the hotel website and away from OTAs, this is also likely to help build customer trust with the brand as the referral is through a trusted site.
Membership Programmes and Perks
The biggest advantage online travel agents offer is the convenience of comparing multiple hotels and prices so the user can determine the best deal for them. However, hotel brands can create their own incentives for users to encourage them to book from the hotel website directly. Membership schemes, discounts and extras or add-ons are all ways to motivate guests to book directly.
Search and Booking Engine
When it comes to booking your hotel accommodation, the search for everything your consumer requires can be complex. Online travel agents often add to the complexity of this, having you search and filter through the results they find for the user based on their requirements and then transferring you through to the native website. Often dates, rooms and times can change once you reach the native site, making it increasingly frustrating for the user. Developing a simple, responsive and easy to use booking engine for your travellers can significantly enhance the consumer experience and make it far more likely that your consumers will book with your brand.
Auto-complete and auto-suggestions are great ways to help simplify the search process for your users, particularly when helping them search for specific destinations. Auto-complete helps the user define an answer by aiming to predict the user’s query based on the characters the user has entered into the search, saving the user time and reducing inaccuracies if the user cannot remember or spell the name of the destination correctly. Auto-suggest offers virtually endless options and ideas within the context of the website, which is related to the characters the user has typed into the search. Airbnb provides a great example of this, allowing users to type in a location and suggesting any results concerning that specific location.
Auto-Suggestions for Easy Hotel’s New Website
Auto-suggestions can be implemented even further within the search and help guide the user to what their searching for by using auto-suggestions. We’ve worked closely with the budget hotel chain Easy Hotel, developing a new website and search function for their site. We implemented auto-suggestions within the new search, which returns relevant results based on the keywords the user types into the search bar, extending the search to hotels, cities and countries.
Dynamic Pricing
In short dynamic pricing is changing the price of hotel rooms based on supply and demand. It’s a great feature to utilise within the hospitality industry as it can increase bookings all year round. A study by Harvard Business School found that dynamic pricing can increase revenue by 43%. Dynamic pricing also enables hotel brands to compete directly with OTAs as it allows brands to charge a more competitive rate with no need to add commission.
UX/UI Design
The process of planning a holiday or travel break is a complex and requires user’s to browse a number of sources and touch points during their online shopping journey. Simplifying the user experience for your customers can help remove some of the complexity that comes across with booking a hotel stay. Streamlining the booking process, removing any unnecessary touch points or features, adding clear call-to-actions and implementing auto-fill sections into the booking form can all increase usability, ease of booking and help drive conversion.
