A Guide to Improving the Online Hotel Guest Experience
By: Univers Labs
Tags: Travel, Hotels Booking Online, Hotel Booking, UX Design, UI Design

Mobile Optimised

La Mirabeau

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

Hotel Creatives

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

Wyndham Rewards Membership Scheme

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

Easy Hotel Auto-suggestions

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

St. Regis Hotel, Venice

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.