In 2015, when Booking.com launched the 1st ever mobile app to facilitate hotel bookings through smartphones, it became a turning point in the history of the hospitality industry.
With time, booking hotels on smartphones gained momentum. And today, it stands as one of the most preferred ways by travelers to reserve any accommodation facility.
It’s high time that hotels should shift their focus on how they can utilise this source in the best possible way. So, go, grab a cup of coffee, and read this blog to know more about mobile hotel bookings and tips to increase them.
Table of Content
Why Should Hotels Focus on Mobile Bookings?
Before we look at the tips on increasing mobile bookings, let’s look at some intriguing stats shared by Google about hotels and smartphones.
- Hotel and flight bookings are among the top 9 searches on mobiles
- Around 79% travelers use their mobile phones for booking travel facilities, as compared to 70% in 2016 (accommodation and transport)
- Travel searches for today and tomorrow on mobile has exponentially increased by 150% in the last 2 years
Even if I leave the facts aside, you cannot deny that booking hotels on mobile is way more convenient than on a laptop or PC:
- Just unlock your phone;
- Search for hotels near me;
- Browse the results;
- Select the property;
- Redirect website or the app’s booking page;
- Fill the details
- Make the payment;
- And receive the confirmation.
That was pretty simple, wasn’t it? Maximum 5 mins, that’s all it takes to do so. Therefore, as a hotelier, you should focus on how easily you can get guests to book your property through mobile.
How to Increase Mobile Bookings For Hotels?
As I mentioned the importance of mobile hotel bookings, here are some easy peasy tips you can implement to increase them.
1. Make your website mobile-friendly
Begin with optimising your website for mobiles. If you think that’s unnecessary, think again.
The reason I’m emphasising on this is because if you do not have a mobile-friendly website it will affect your guest experience.
In fact, this is what a survey by Google from users across the world revealed:
If there is friction on a hotel’s mobile website while room booking, guests opt for other properties instantly.
So ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, faster, and easy to navigate.
2. Invest in your hotel’s app
Many hotels and OTAs these days are building hotel booking apps. If you check on Google Play Store or App-Store, you’ll find a gazillion of them.
Hotel booking apps intrigued hoteliers owing to the fact that they helped them in boosting their sales. Even though the charges for per booking ranged between 5-20%, this was a fair deal.
Still many hotels think that building an app for their brand is costly, complicated, and futile. But hold on, here’s the truth.
There are many tech organisations that can help you in building your hotel’s mobile-app. Alternatively, you can opt for AI based software using which you can create a mobile hotel booking application in minutes.
Also, let me tell you that it’s not that expensive. You can opt for a monthly subscription or work on commission basis.
3. Create app-only offers
When I joined Go-MMT, many hoteliers asked me specifically to run app-only offers on their property’s listings. The reason was discounts offered during app fest (sometimes even 90%) which increased their bookings exponentially.
It’s one of the sureshot strategies to increase hotel bookings from apps, and there are two ways to approach this step:
- If you don’t have an application for your property, you can create discounts for your OTA listings. Those when clubbed with payment offers give guests an alluring discount, thereby increasing your property’s mobile bookings.
- In case you have your hotel’s application, you can simply use the TAC offered to third parties as direct discount to guests if they book from an android or iOS app.
This strategy can be used to boost your guests’ loyalty. Moreover, you can pitch other guests and encourage them to use the app for future bookings.
4. Speed up the payment process
When it comes to making online payments while booking a hotel, I just keep my fingers crossed. Because I’m always skeptical about the payment going through.
What if the amount is debited and the booking isn’t successful? How much time would it take for the refund to process? Do I need to chase hoteliers or third parties for the amount?
It’s not only me, but guests across the world face these problems while booking a hotel through mobile. Well, you can address these issues by optimising your property’s payment process.
Partner with the right payment gateway provider to facilitate faster and easier payments. Also, try to keep various payment options for guests like credit cards, debit cards, and UPI.
In case you have an influx of international travelers, ensure that your hotel’s app or web page has payment options for them as well like PayPal.
5. Keep reservation form short and simple
No one likes to fill long reservation forms. Even though autofill does this task easily for guests by updating their saved details, some websites and apps ask them to update other points like address, passport details, ID proof, and so on.
If you have such long forms, guests would skip it and book your property either from an OTA or choose another property which can help in quick reservation. Which means, it’s a direct loss for you.
I’d say keep the form short and simple. Just name, contact number, and email id should do good. The rest of the details can be updated later on when guests arrive at the property.
Note: Include Optical Character Reader (OCR ) scanner in your app or have one integrated in your PMS. It’ll help in filling the guest details easily.
6. Embed CTA on each page
While you are optimising your property’s website to increase mobile hotel bookings, ensure that each page has CTA available on it. And especially on the pages that describe details of your property’s room categories and facilities.
The reason is simple, don’t make your guests scroll just to make a booking. Let’s say if they like a room in your hotel, enabling CTA on that page will help the visitor to directly opt for reserving the same without going back to the main page.
This strategy will also shorten the booking process time to an extent.
7. Enable push notifications
When you search for flights, you might have come across a pricing alert pop-up. Basically, when you enable it, you get notifications about the rate fluctuations.
This function can be used for your hotel’s website also. If configured correctly, guests can receive alerts of their upcoming booking, house rules and regulations, or any other update regarding hotel policies.
8. Use social media apps
Last but not the least, it’s time to use social media platforms to increase mobile hotel bookings. You must have come across a “book now” option on various Instagram and Facebook pages.
Well, that’s the key that could help you in gaining maximum bookings for your property from social media pages. Whenever you are running promotions across these platforms, ensure you have ‘book now’ CTA enabled.
Butfor this, you need to check if your channel manager
This is one of the missed out strategies that can help you in increasing your mobile bookings for your hotel, especially from young audiences – Millennials and GenZ.
Conclusion
It’s no secret that smartphones have made our lives a lot easier. Be it ordering groceries from nearby stores or booking any international hotel, everything is at your fingertips.
Talking about hotels, smartphones have changed the way guests approach them. Just by Googling ‘hotels around me’, guests can find hundreds of accommodation facilities around them on mobile and book one easily.
This means, hoteliers need to put in efforts to ensure they receive maximum business. In this blog, I’ve shared some easy tips that could help you in increasing your mobile hotel bookings.
You can take a cue from those steps, tweak and implement them right away at your property. Do let me know if I’ve missed anything, I would be happy to address the same in future.
