A hotel website has become a must for selling rooms online. It allows hoteliers to recover direct bookings and reduce the share OTAs take on their turnover.
The final goal is to convince the traveler to book via your website and not elsewhere. That’s why you need to give the traveler the most pleasant booking experience possible on your website.
This is achieved by providing the internet user with a variety of information about your hotel website. Below are some elements that will help you to sell your rooms on your hotel website.
Connect a booking engine to your website, it is mandatory when it comes to selling rooms online
To sell your rooms on your hotel website, you must have a booking engine connected to your site. There are different booking engines on the market, you must choose the one that best suits your activity and your needs.
One of the most important elements for selling your rooms on a hotel website is to choose a quick, responsive booking engine to make it easy for your future customers to make a reservation. In other words, a booking engine has to be adapted to all available digital media. Indeed, the rise of mobile users accessing the internet means having a booking engine that’s compatible with mobile devices is absolutely essential.
Track the entire purchase path on your hotel’s website
Your ability to track the customer’s journey from the moment they arrive on your website is key to improving the performance of your website and generating sales.
With tools like Google Analytics, you can track your visitors’ progress through your booking funnel, i.e. from their arrival on the website to the completion of the booking. To do this, you need to make sure you link your booking engine to your website.
Ensure your Room Pages on your hotel website have all the relevant information
We advise you to make the description on the room pages of your website as precise as possible.
You can, for example:
- Indicate the number of people that can stay in the room or suite.
- Add how many m2 of space there is.
- Mention a major asset that could lead a user to book a room or suite in your hotel.
All the information that makes your room unique should appear on your room pages. It’s also important to make this information visible, even if it can be seen in the photo.
Take a look at an example by the Lodji hotel:
On a hotel room page, you’ll find key information about the room: number of people that can stay in the room, size of the room, type of bedding, and what makes the room attractive and unique.
It’s extremely important to make sure that all the elements present on your OTA room descriptions are also present in the description of your rooms on your official website. This helps to reassure the user and remove doubts about the choice of room as they can easily compare your offer/rooms on your website versus the OTAs.
Adopt tariff disparity
Depending on your type of hotel you can create specific offers for your hotel site. The aim of these offers is to persuade the traveler to book on your hotel’s website.
You should know that travelers are often looking for the best rate. That’s why we recommend that you display the best offer on your website compared to your other distribution channels. It is not enough to present your hotel well, you must also show the travel
er an offer that will convince them to book with you. This will increase your chances of getting a direct reservation and in turn increase your turnover.
It’s not enough to simply present things, an attractive price remains a decisive element for the end customer.
Create promotional offers for your hotel
On a hotel website, the “offer” page is one of the most visited pages, it represents about 20%* of a hotel website’s traffic. We, therefore, advise you to create special offers when you can.
You can create one-off offers such as:
- Breakfast included
- SPA access
- A catering deal
- A family deal
You can keep the offers very simple and still convince the traveler to stay at your hotel.
* internal source
Selling your rooms on your hotel website, a considerable advantage to reduce OTA commission
When you sell your rooms on your website, you reduce the OTA commission on your bookings.
A traveler booking one of your rooms on an OTA like Booking.com, means that you will be subject to a minimum commission of about 17%*.
The OTAs’ commission increases according to the offers you activate, the minimum threshold is between 25% and 30% commission.*
Travelers naturally turn to price comparison sites as a search engine to look for a hotel in a particular area. It is worthwhile for hoteliers to be visible on this type of platform, but to recover the reservations directly on their own hotel website.
* Commissions vary by region and country.
Conclusion
To sell your rooms on your website, you must make it attractive. You need to give travelers relevant and easily visible information about your hotel, as it contributes to their purchase decision.
We recommend making the booking experience easy with a smooth booking engine, providing information about everything that makes your rooms unique.
But don’t forget that the rate at which you offer your rooms also plays a part in the decision to book at your hotel. We therefore recommend that you offer the best deals directly on your site.
Do you want to sell more rooms on your hotel website? Contact our teams who will advise you on your digital hotel distribution.
