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Top 10 Strategies To Increase Hotel Direct Bookings

How would you plan to get more direct bookings when the average hotel website conversion rate stands at below 2%, despite hoteliers spending on marketing and SEO activities?

Well, there is no definite, isolated way to drastically increase direct bookings at your hotel.

Increased direct booking is a result of many collaborative efforts.

And most importantly, you must strike a delicate balance between your OTA strategy and direct booking strategy. This is advisable because many potential guests come to your website after they discover your brand on an OTA platform.

Here are some of the tricks that can help you attract more guests to your property, directly.

  • 1. Leverage the power of a well-optimized website

    When we talk about how to increase direct booking, your hotel brand website plays a crucial role. It must have a strong digital identity to attract maximum visitors.

    Your hotel website should be –

    • Visually attractive, easy-to-navigate and above all, it should be user-friendly
    • It should be properly optimized for search engines. This makes your hotel website visible on search engines, thus attracting increased visitors
    • You must consider using relevant content on your website to garner organic traffic to your website. Direct booking coming from desktops contributes 84% of bookings.
    • Implement multi-language and multi-currency features
    • Allow your website visitor to explore your hotel through ‘Virtual Tour’
    • Offer and ensure ‘Best Rate Guarantee’
    • Most importantly, your hotel website should be mobile-responsive. Because, bookings coming from mobile devices are increasing year on year, which stands at around 10%, currently

    Don’t forget to ensure that your website does not take long time to load.

    • According to Tnooz, 32% of bookings on mobile devices are abandoned due to slow loading time
    • Around 30% will abandon a transaction due to poor mobile responsiveness
    • This could lead to around 10% reduction in direct booking conversion
  • 2. Integrate a Web Booking Engine, turn your brand website into a potential source of direct booking

    Integrating a web booking engine into your brand website enables your website visitors to view the availability of rooms in real-time. This is one of the easiest ways to increase direct hotel bookings. Guests could even receive instant confirmation against their bookings directly from your hotel PMS. This enhances a guest’s confidence that the hotel would definitely honor the booking.

    Make sure that the booking engine can help you in –

    • Processing and handling payments
    • Allowing you to offer deals based on your booking rules and different payment options
  • 3. Allow guests to book directly through your brand’s Facebook page

    In today’s world of ‘social media frenzy’, leading platforms like Facebook play a major role in increasing your hotel’s brand awareness and presence across the globe. Guests are not only sharing their hotel stay experience and photos on Facebook, but are also using these platforms to book their accommodation.

    Adopt a booking engine that can be integrated with your brand’s Facebook page. It would help travelers to book directly with you from your hotel’s Facebook page. Plus, you need to promote positive reviews to attract potential bookers.

    Here is how Facebook plays a crucial role –

    • 76% of travelers post their vacation photos and reviews regularly
    • Around 52% of Facebook users say that their friends’ photos inspire their travel plan
  • 4. Grow your presence on metasearch engines

    According to Trivago, around 50% of all online bookers use metasearch to find their ideal hotel, and this trend is set to go up in coming years. Metasearch engines help travellers make an informed hotel reservation by allowing them to compare a hotel’s price listed on several OTAs. It also shows the price mentioned on the hotel website.

    Now, here is the trick – promote your website rates on metasearch. This would prompt a traveler to visit the hotel’s brand website, thus giving a boost to direct booking.

How can we help you?

CHILCHILL Consulting has always been focused around providing simple, straightforward and affordable hospitality consulting, revenue management support, advice and training to hotel owners and hospitality professionals.

Looking for a First-Class Hotel Direct Booking Strategy?