Addressing Booking Engine Abandonment for Independent Hotels
In this video our CEO Tom O’Rourke discusses booking engine abandonment in the hotel space and how we can use guest experience design methodology (GX) to reduce abandonment and improve conversion.
Video Transcript
Hi, this is Tom from O’Rourke and today I would like to address booking engine abandonment for independent hotels. I’d like to go through why it’s happening today and propose a new booking journey that could dramatically reduce abandonment.
So, to understand the ‘Why’ let’s take a look at what the website visitor does today. When they come to the accommodations landing page, they scan through all the different room types. When they find the room that’s appropriate for them, they select that room and then we ask them to book and herein lies the problem because the website visitor hasn’t even understood if this room is available and if it’s within their price range. To get that information we have to redirect them to the booking engine and if they find when they get there that it’s not within their budget, of course, they’ll abandon. If they find when they get there that it’s not available of course they’ll abandon, and from there they’ll scan the offers enter the guest information, and confirm the booking.
What we propose is a new booking journey called the guest experience design methodology or GX. So, the same website visitor comes to that website, they scan the room types, we don’t redirect them at that point. They can review the room card and get the first question answered. Is this the room that I want? They can then filter by price and availability and understand on the front-end website that this is exactly what I want within my price range and it’s available on those days at that point, we’ll turn them to the booking engine where all they have to do is enter the guest information and confirm the booking.
So, what have we done here? We’ve reduced the friction in getting that hotel room by 50%, we’ve taken it from six steps to three steps. So, if you’d like more information on guest experience design, we’d love to hear from you. Thank you.