How important is booking engine design for your guests?
The development team at Pebble have been working closely with the development team at Siteminder to offer a much more native and fluid experience in booking a room directly through a hotel website using The Booking Button.
The typical guest experience when wanting to book is a 6 action step process and is done by leading the guest out of the hotel website and into the online booking website, a very different online environment. This confuses many patrons and can also raise ‘trust’ issues – “…am I still booking directly with the hotel, this website has suddenly changed?” We can now minimise this to 3 action steps and keep the user journey within the hotel website up until the actual online guest enters payment details. Due to very stringent and necessary PCI DD compliance, this action is still being done on a hotel branded page within The Booking Button.
One of the biggest hurdles for independent hotel websites is not displaying an immediate rate with the room types and the dynamic pricing yield management adds complexity in being able to do this. Due to some very clever technology and developers, we can now feed ‘today’s best rate’ directly into the website.
This now makes choosing a room type much easier in the hotel site as guests have a price to compare the room types by. Price does play a big role in the buying journey and the ‘look & feel’ of the room is a big deciding factor. We can control and design the rooms page to best portray the guest experience with images, video and relative book direct incentives etc.
The guest having chosen their room type, clicks book and they can enter their dates for us to display the best rates and packages for that room type suited to their preferred dates. If they are staying multiple nights, we display the total cost of their stay, making this as seamless as possible for the guest. They can display more detailed information on the different packages or simply go through to book their room.
For a live demonstration, give us a call or contact us and find out how you can increase your direct revenue.
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