How to Improve Hotel Website Conversion Rate?

The formula to calculate the hotel website macro-conversion rate is:  

Conversion rate = (Number of website bookings / total number of website visitors/sessions) x 100

While this calculus is not rocket science, the real challenge is collecting the relevant and necessary data and analyzing it accurately to make data-driven decisions.   

Tools like Google Analytics and CreateWith, a smart hotel website builder, can help hotels gain insights into their web traffic and visitors' behavior, among other things. These insights allow hotels to optimize their website’s performance and convert lookers into bookers.   

Another challenge that hotels face with hotel website conversions is to bring visitors to take all conversion actions. With so many options available, hotels really need to get every step in the process right to attract, covert, and retain guests.   

And that’s exactly what this blog will help you with.   

We will give you some key tips to improve your hotel website conversion rates. But before getting into that, let’s understand some basic concepts of hotel website conversion rates and why is it important.

Why Website Conversion rate is important for Hotels?

Website conversion rates indicate how a hotel website is doing in terms of persuading visitors to book or take micro/macro-conversion actions. It is an important indicator of a hotel website’s effectiveness or return on your investment and revenue growth.   

Driving direct bookings is no cakewalk. If your hotel website could help you do it, it will allow you to maintain a steady occupancy rate and competitive prices whilst saving OTA commission fees. This will improve your overall revenue. And isn’t that the end goal of every strategy that is implemented in any business?   

Hoteliers thus should prioritize improving their website conversion rates and invest time and money into the process. So, we suggest you start taking notes because we are going to tell you how to do it in the subsequent sections of this blog.

What is Hotel Booking Funnel and What are its types?

Another crucial concept to understand before learning about the tips to improve hotel website conversions is the booking funnel. It is the process that a potential customer has to go through from the moment they become aware of your hotel to the time they make a booking.   

The different hotel booking funnel types or stages are:  

Tips to Boost Your Hotel Website Conversion Rate

With an average website conversion rate of 2%, meaning that for every 100 website visitors, only 2 proceed with the next step, the hospitality industry must put in hard work to optimize their website conversion rates. 

CRO or conversion rate optimization strategies can help hotels with that.  

But let’s first look at the common reasons why hotel websites are achieving low conversion rates:  

• Lack of relevant information.   
• No smart booking engine on the website.   
• A cumbersome booking process.  
• Slow, difficult to navigate, and unresponsive websites.  

Now that we know some of the key reasons for low conversion rates, let’s see how you can boost them.   

1. Carefully choose the website design and content

Website is one of the first guest touchpoints that leave a lasting impression on your visitors. So, ensure to speak to your visitors through it. Keep your website relevant and aligned to your niche for better search engine rankings.  

Offer all the relevant information and visual content that would be needed to make a booking, ease of navigation, clear and catchy call-to-actions, etc.  

Furthermore, keep the website design simple and user-friendly yet attractive and as per the brand image and aesthetics. Content added should be optimized for search engines and images, videos, and infographics should be of high quality.   

Lastly, add comparison tools, review widgets, and live chat options on your website as a study suggests that these elements increase your website conversion rates.  

2. Add a booking engine

Add a smart booking engine to your hotel website to allow visitors to make a direct booking with you instead of redirecting to some third-party website.   

A smart booking engine on the official website will allow you to build trust, capture maximum bookings, increase your revenue, and eliminate OTA commission fees. Ensure that payment gateways integrated offer data security and accept multiple payment options.   

3. Incentivize direct bookings by adding promotional offers

Bringing potential guests to the website isn’t enough. Luring them to book directly with you is also a tip to improve hotel website conversion rates. You can offer discounts, special deals, promo codes, slashed prices, etc., and incentivize guests to book directly on the hotel website. 

One thing to ensure here is to keep your promotional deals clear and transparent. If a guest feels cheated at this guest touchpoint, there is no saving. The guest won’t return to the site and even maybe property and bad word of mouth doesn’t take long to spread.

4. Catch attention with clear CTAs

CTAs or call-to-action buttons such as ‘Book now’ are really important for improving the hotel website conversion rates. These buttons help visitors reach their end goal faster and more easily. Thus, these buttons should be easy to read and understand and placed to be easily located.

You can place it above the fold, between, or near the end of blog posts or other resources. Take the help of pop-ups, banners, floating bars, etc., to make CTAs more visible, prominent, and accessible. Furthermore, use language that nudges visitors to click and explore more or take action.

CTAs should take the visitor right to the intended page and nowhere else. If you are struggling to set them up, leverage products like CreateWith that will help you set up your website in the best way possible and increase your hotel website conversion rates.

5. Simplify the booking process

One of the most important tips to improve your hotel website conversion rates is to keep the website booking process as simple as possible. A report suggests that 42% of users checks the hotel booking engine for availability and rates, 9% moves forward into the booking process and only 2.2% finalizes the transaction.

This highlights issues with the booking process and urges hotels to keep a frictionless check-out experience for potential guests. A simplified, hassle-free, straight booking process encourages guests to book directly with you and helps you earn quick conversions.   

Long and tiring booking processes make potential guests abandon their carts and book on websites with a simple booking process such as popular OTAs - Booking.com, Expedia, etc. Keep the booking process steps are less as possible with multiple currency options for wider reach and accessibility.   

Solutions such as CreateWith can help with adding a simple and easy booking process to your hotel website.

6. Send out reminder emails

In case a visitor abandons your site after inquiring, it is a good practice to set up reminder alarms to bring the potential guest back to book with you. Reminder emails encourage visitors to come back and complete their transactions when such emails include enticing offers and upsells.   

Send these emails a day or two days later to the first visit and include relevant information in it such as room types, booking dates, excepted number of guests, special offers or deals, upsell packages, etc. Give clear CTAs to prompt action.

7. Optimize website performance

Last but not least, optimize your website for performance. This is a crucial point in the improving your hotel website conversion rates guide. It should be optimized for both search engines as well as mobile. So, create a responsive website with images added in a way that doesn’t slow down the loading speed of website pages.   

Basic functionality and other requirements of the website should be well met. Check the bounce rate and other website analytics regularly, to evaluate your website’s performance and take measures accordingly.

How can BOTSHOT help?

Choose a hotel website builder tool such as CreateWith to enhance your hotel website with features like:

• SEO and mobile-optimized website building,  
• ease of integration with Channel Manager, and hotel PMS,  
• detailed analytics,  
• secure payment gateways with a simple booking process, etc.   

Websites created using CreateWith also offer live chat options through integration with Freddie, an AI-conversational chatbot for 24*7 guest queries and assistance.

Never have a visitor return without booking with you with CreateWith!

Book your 14-day FREE trial today.