Tips for boosting online reservation for hotels

There is a paradigm shift in travel and tourism industry, because of the penetration of the smartphones. Mobile has transformed human behavior profoundly, people no longer go online, they live online. There is 35 crore people online in India, out of which 22 crores are smartphone users, and 50% of google searches are travel related. Hoteliers need to take note of this shift and join the movement. To capture this key opportunity, brands need to be there, in order to gain customer loyalty.

Being an hotelier you have to understand, many ways a traveler might come across your brand. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about their intent and mindset, and what you can do to slip your brand swiftly in the decision making phase of your potential guests. We have compiled some tips for you to effectively market your hotel and increase your online reservation.

Know Your Customer

The first step is to understand, who your target audience is? And we are not talking about just the demographic data here, it is helpful but you have to look beyond the demographics, and understand who they are conceptually – there likes and dislikes, behavioral trends both online and offline and their internet surfing tendency or you can simply use Roomito’s revenue management services. Our team of experts will guide you with extensive market and competitors analysis reports, hotel positioning support and much more.

This will help you to design and direct your marketing efforts-

• Look and feel of your website on the basis of your target audience to drive maximum conversion
• Social media channels to target, If you are a boutique hotel, you can Easily leverage Instagram to market your property

User-Friendly Website

According to the Google data, 53% of the mobile sites are abandoned, if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Your hotel’s website is your prime asset and you have to make sure, that user stays on your website and gets converted into a loyal guest, in order to maximize commission free bookings. You can make sure of the following points while designing your website to make it user-friendly-

• Minimize your site load time to match the global average
• Make your website easily navigable
• Latest trend is of minimal UI, update or design your website
• Pay attention to the User Experience
• Add attractive images and explainer diagrams

Roomito offers professional CMS driven website solution, for easy website deployment.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimization is one of the most viable tools to bring your business more qualified leads and customers. Moreover, SEO can prove to be more cost-effective and can deliver better ROI than traditional marketing like TV and print ads. All Roomito websites are on page SEO optimized. Keep in mind the following points to utilize the SEO properly.

• Optimize your website content, to make it SEO friendly
• Minimize your website load time
• Use SEO friendly URLs
• Wrap your title in an

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• Wrap subheadings in

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• Use responsive web design

Announce and emphasize the online reservation option on your hotel website

Adding online reservation functionality to the hotel’s website is imperative for long-term sustainability, as it gives you the freedom to boost your commission free bookings, and build your own hotel brand to minimize the dependency on OTAs. Roomito offers booking engine, which can be easily setup and can be customized to match your website’s look and feel. It comes integrated with online payment gateway, to accept online payments with ease.

Include Social Proof on your Website

Adding guests review section on your website can boost your conversion, as 81% of the online users find the guest reviews to be very useful. Not just that adding social proof to your website, coming directly from your satisfied guests, builds credibility and adds to the overall brand value.

Retarget Your Previous Guests

It is relatively easy and cost effective to retain your previous satisfied guests than to acquire a new guest. Always insist your guests to share their email address, and build your guests database, which you can use to run targeted email marketing campaigns. Also, Design and draft pre check-in and post checkout emails, (we will talk about email marketing for hotels in depth in our next article) to add to the customer delight.

Offer Loyalty Program

Running Loyalty programs assures that you have return guests. One of the tools can be to offer your guests loyalty points, which they can redeem on their next booking. This will help you to build a loyal customer base.

Be Accessible

The main reason why OTAs are so successful is that they are easily accessible, and have simplified the whole process of planning and booking an accommodation for guests. In order to strengthen your hotel brand, you have to be accessible to the customer’s, hotels can leverage the use of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp to easily connect with their guests and answer any query or doubt that they have, or even to market their brand.