In an ideal world, hotels would thrive on direct bookings alone. You own the communication, pay zero commissions, and drive direct bookings through your hotel’s direct booking channel, enhancing your hotel's online presence.
While it’s true that OTAs are a crucial part of the booking distribution mix, that doesn’t mean you can’t improve visibility to attract more potential guests and convert more direct bookings.
Increasing direct booking conversions and reducing OTA fees needs the right tools and strategies. In this article, you’ll learn three strategies your hotel can use to boost your most important channel with Clock’s integrated booking engine.
The challenge to increase hotel direct bookings
Hotels rely on online travel agencies (OTAs) for a large percentage of their bookings. However, large commissions exceeding 20% with virtual cards and limited direct communication opportunities make increasing direct bookings a great priority and encourage direct bookings by actively engaging with travellers.
Direct booking can often allow for more flexibility regarding booking changes or cancellations compared to OTA bookings. They also help hotels keep 15-25% more revenue on each reservation by not paying commissions to OTAs.
Improving the direct booking experience
However, the hotel direct booking experience is often poor. Statista reports a 70% global digital shopping cart abandonment rate. While this report is for e-commerce, this abandonment trend proves there’s an inclination to cancel purchases online — and hotels are not immune.
Too many confusing steps to finalise the booking or poor design can make bookers go elsewhere. A smooth and engaging direct booking process is essential to retain potential guests and ensure a seamless reservation experience.
Use the strategies below with Clock PMS+ to increase direct booking conversions, reduce OTA fees and improve the guest experience.
1. Use direct booking links on your hotel website
Booking the room you want should be easy. Implementing direct booking strategies and marketing tactics on your own website can significantly improve this process. The more steps you have, the higher the risk of a potential guest abandoning their direct booking. If a hotel has a promotion with a bonus code, the field for entering it might be missing when it’s time to check out. A strong hotel's online presence is crucial for making the direct booking process seamless and attractive to potential guests.
Use the link builder to make direct bookings simple. Create your unique direct booking link with the specific rooms, rates, and pre-selected days. You can even add the bonus code. All that’s left for the guest to do is click the link, add any of your upsell offers, and pay.
Every room features your room descriptions and a beautiful image gallery to inform your new guests of the information they need to convert.
There are even more ways to use the link builder. If you feature your different types of rooms on your website, you can create a unique link for each and feature them on your website.
Removing other options and complex steps is crucial for increasing direct booking conversion rates. Let’s say you showcase your deluxe room. Add your direct booking link to your deluxe room page’s “Book now” buttons.
The guest scrolls your hotel website, sees the room they want, and can book it in one simple step. And if they want to explore other rooms within the booking engine, they can edit the filters.
You can also use the link builder for holiday offers. For example, you can promote your special Valentine’s Day or Christmas offers by creating the link and adding it to your website buttons.
You can bypass the booking process’s first step on special holidays – by pre-defining the right days. Create your link for the holiday times, and the guest experience improves when they can book with a click, using your special holiday rates applied automatically.
2. Have a website booking form
Have you ever booked a flight online? Improving your hotel's online presence with a website booking form can simplify the booking experience and motivate more conversions, mimicking the ease of booking a flight online with a hotel booking engine.
On the home page, feature a slide-in or static form where new guests can enter their dates, including the number of adults and children, to search and book your best available rooms.
For example, when booking a flight, adding booking information from the home page takes them to the available options with the best-calculated rates.
That means direct bookings conversion starts as they land on your hotel website.
Customise the form with up to eight fields, including arrival and departure date.
The guest can add a bonus code, the number of guests, and the information you need to present them with the best stay options.
A website booking form is crucial if you want to boost your direct bookings.
3. Showcase images and information
Drive more direct bookings and increase direct bookings with beautiful imagery and design for higher hotel direct booking conversions.
Presenting your rooms in the best possible light motivates your potential guests to take action.
With an image gallery and room descriptions within the direct bookings screen, you can motivate new guests throughout the booking process.
Choose your best room images and add them to each room. When guests book, they’ll see your images across their booking experience.
Present your best images first. First impressions matter; you want to ensure they see something they can’t say no to for the best conversions.
Why Clock increases hotel direct booking conversions
You need a system with the latest features for a delightful booking experience to maximize your hotel direct bookings and booking conversions.
1. Simplicity and flexibility
The direct bookings engine from Clock PMS+ is extremely mobile-friendly, helping increase booking conversions
Since many direct bookings happen from smartphones, enabling a fast and simple mobile booking experience on hotel websites is crucial.
With a login option, guests can use their Google account or email to get their information pre-filled, saving time and further simplifying the booking process.
If something in their information changes, they edit it quickly and pay with their preferred payment method.
Let’s say a couple stays for four nights, and the wife wants a spa procedure on their last day. The hotel system Clock PMS+ lets them easily choose and book the spa treatment using the booking engine. They can also add any extra services later in their guest portal.
2. Branding customisation
Having a coherent brand online is vital, especially on beautiful websites. To attract and increase the conversion rate for your target audience in your most important distribution channel, having wide customisation options is vital to get qualified traffic and more revenue.
With wide customization options, you can attract more direct bookings. Configure and design the system to fit your hotel brand style and needs to encourage more direct bookings. And let the guest can fully control which extra services they want, for how many people, and for how many days.
For example, if guests book a three-night stay, they can choose to get a bottle of champagne delivered to their room on their first night only.
3. Non-accommodation direct bookings
Apart from getting more direct bookings, independent hotels with the right booking engines also work with inventory items, like mountain bikes or surfboards, with limited availability, often competing with third-party booking sites for these reservations.
It can significantly enhance the promotion of non-accommodation direct bookings, attracting more guests to utilize additional services.
The capacity counter manages the inventory, and if the product or service is available, Clock PMS+ automatically upsells them on your chosen room rates. Unavailable products or services will automatically disappear from the booking engine.
The non-accommodation booking capabilities in Clock make it easy to track inventory and upsell all your capacity-based products or services together with your room bookings.
You can also convert website visitors to shuttle services for a competitive price
4. Wide range of payment options
Clock also lets you offer various payment methods for collecting payments, including through metasearch engines like Google Hotel Ads, which can give you more direct bookings. For example, let guests pay by card or via bank transfer.
Offering various payment methods in the hotel's booking engine can significantly boost direct bookings.
That also goes for alternative payment methods like Google Pay, Apple Pay, or country-specific options like the Swedish Swish.
The booking engine automatically offers country-specific payment options based on the booker’s IP address. For example, if it’s a Belgium IP address, it would show popular Belgian payment methods.
A wide range of payment options tailored to your guest’s location boosts direct bookings.
Summary
Boosting and getting more direct bookings is a worthy goal. With more direct bookings, you improve the channel where you keep all the profits. Getting more hotel website bookings lets you own the communication to delight guests without dummy emails or no-response confirmations, boosting guest loyalty.
You now have three effective strategies for ensuring more of your best guests complete more direct bookings from your website.
From significantly simplifying the booking process with the link builder to adding a high-conversion home page booking and displaying your rooms with beautiful imagery, Clock’s booking engine is built for booking completion.
For a user-friendly way to encourage more direct bookings using a booking engine with instant and seamless integration with your PMS, look no further than Clock PMS+.
