“Major structural shifts are underway in the hospitality industry. According to a recent study conducted by Merrill Lynch, online bookings as a share of total reservations increased from 30% in 2006 to 40% in 2008. The same study projects that 45% of hotel bookings will be made online by the year 2010.1 As Q1 2009 iPerceptions Hospitality Industry Report demonstrates, booking is the leading preoccupation of hotel website visitors. In this way, hospitality websites face a basket of challenges not dissimilar to main¬line e-commerce sites: optimizing the transactional experience for visitors who are onsite to book and ensuring that researchers and rate shoppers are efficiently shepherded down the booking funnel.
At the same time as the web is morphing the traditional relationship between hotel and patron, eco¬nomic jitters pose a systemic challenge to the industry. Industry analysts expect a measurable slowdown in travel this year, as both business and leisure consumers forego travel plans to save money. Snapshot data shows that year-over-year industry occupancy rates fell 12.3% in the calendar week March 22 to March 28.2 Looking ahead, those who do travel will no doubt change their booking habits – specifically, they will wait until the last minute to book in order to obtain the best prices, combing through the online brokerage sites to shave valuable dollars off room rates. Cost sensitivity is already having a negative impact on hospitality website satisfaction scores. In Q1 2009, the two weakest attributes in the sector—Bottom Line and Starting Point—pertained directly to price and perceived sense of value.
When we slice the hospitality website visitor base by primary intent, we find some disquieting task com¬pletion data, which elucidates the high-level trends being written about by analysts in the field. Only 51% of bookers were capable of completing their tasks. While some of the reasons underpinning this low rate might have been outside the purview of the web experience, significant numbers of bookers reported problems with site navigation, the booking flow, and insufficient hotel/room information, all of which fall squarely on the plate of interactive marketers and website developers.
To counteract this, hotel websites will need to focus on better engaging and persuading visitors at incipi¬ent stages of the booking cycle. As the data shows, one in two visitors were onsite for the first time and thus not acclimated to site navigation, architecture, and functionality. Hotel websites struggled to effectively cater to this segment, as evidenced by their collective iPerceptions Satisfaction Index score of 6.85, starkly lower than the score of 7.51 posted by the most frequent visitors. To boost their efficiency in a troubled economic climate, hotel websites will need to focus on delivering simpler, more intuitive site navigation, a streamlined booking process, and more robust content, supplemented with better pictures and more lifelike virtual tours”
Source:
The team at Hotel Online Marketing understand hotel websites and all our clients report a substantial increase in conversion and therefore ONLINE BOOKINGS. Hotel Online Marketing is a specialist Internet marketing service, catering exclusively to the hotel industry. Put simply, we do online marketing for hotels. And we don’t do anything else. We help your target traveller find your website, we help you convert them into customers when they do, and we help you keep them coming back.
Call us today!
One Comment
Awesome post!!
Post a Comment