How To Improve Your Hotel Website Conversion Rate
To get more room nights and more revenue, you need to understand the hotel booking funnel.
We know it’s nice to get more “lookers” onto your hotel website — but how about more bookers? How do you get people to actually book and importantly, book direct?
Most people don’t just book the first hotel they find, and unfortunately, most people won’t book yours the first time they visit your website.
The path to purchase is multi-channel and multi-device. That’s why you can’t rely on any one customer acquisition strategy alone.
(By the way, if you haven't read my other post on getting more traffic to your hotel website, you might want to press ‘pause' and go read that one first.)
If you have a steady amount of traffic coming in from multiple sources, you need to think about the next piece of the puzzle: Conversion.
You’ve got them onto your hotel website… now what? How do you get folks to take action and make a new hotel booking? Or book a dinner reservation, submit a group or event RFP, hand over their email, and so on.
All of these “actions” are technically “conversions” that your hotel website should be optimized for. So here’s how to create a hotel website that actually converts.
The hotel website booking funnel, explained
Like I said in a previous post, getting traffic to your hotel website is easy.
The hard part is actually turning that traffic into bookings. For that to happen, you need to be doing a lot of other things right.
Things you need to have “right” include:
…a hotel website that loads quickly and makes it easy for visitors to find whatever they need (aka a good user experience!)
…the “whatever they need,” including high-quality images of your property and amenities, information about your location and services, etc.
…a system that lets potential guests check their travel dates, see what room(s) are available, and how much their individual stay is going to cost them.
…a secure method of taking their inquiry or better yet, their payment details.
Allllllll of those things ☝️ also represent opportunities where you could be LOSING potential customers.
The hotel industry is unique because you likely have multiple business segments to consider.
Your sales team wants to gather prospects and turn them in to leads for groups and events. Your F&B team wants to drive more restaurant or bar bookings.
For now, let’s focus on a typical hotel website booking funnel for guest room bookings.
This funnel can look a little different depending on how your website is set up, of course. But it generally follows a similar pattern to the typical marketing or sales funnel: Awareness > Consideration > Decision.
Here’s a simple, 4-step example of a basic hotel booking funnel:
Like this hotel booking funnel graphic? Great! Sharing with credit or a link back to this blog post is encouraged and always appreciated.
At any one of these steps, you can (and absolutely will) experience some drop-off.
Think about all the different opportunities your customer has to decide, “No thanks” and move on:
Website doesn’t load? Time to open a new tab and keep looking…
Can’t find the room descriptions? Hard pass…
Booking system looks dodgy as hell? I’m taking my credit card elsewhere, thanks…
My dates aren’t available or you won’t tell me the price? Well, buh-bye then…
I want to stress that some drop-off at each step is perfectly normal.
The most obvious example of this is, of course, price and availability! You can’t please everyone, nor should you.
But sometimes, the stars DO align. As in, you’re getting steady traffic to your website from people who actually want what you have, when you have it… and they want to book! Yay! 🎉
What you want to do is optimize your hotel website for those people. Here’s how.
How to optimize your hotel website for conversions
Understand TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU
To simplify this process, you need to get verrry familiar with that booking funnel I shared above. ☝️
Remember, you’ll find the largest pool of potential customers at the Top of the Funnel (ToFu) or “Awareness” phase.
Often, these are folks who find your hotel website through SEO, heard about you through word-of-mouth, or even just saw a Facebook or Instagram post they liked. They’re in the very early stages of travel planning… as in, still dreaming or looking for inspiration.
In the Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) are the people who are actively starting to plan or research. The “Consideration” phase.
Again, good SEO and strategic content marketing can get more MoFu visitors onto your hotel website. These people may plug in their travel dates and check availability — but something is still keeping them from pulling out that credit card.
At the Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu) are people who are ready to book. The “Decision” or “Action” phase.
They want exactly what you have and they’re ready to get it. But again, drop-off can still occur.
When people (ahem, digital marketing agencies) reference a full funnel marketing strategy, this is what they’re usually talking about: Applying different tactics to reach, nurture, and convert bookings at different stages of the decision journey.
We’re focusing on conversions today, so we’re going to to dig into where and why drop-off occurs.
Drop-off at different stages happens for different reasons, so the first thing you need to do is figure out where it’s happening and why.
Know where you’re losing customers (and why)
One of the most important features on a hotel website is the ability to track key performance metrics.
The latest fancy design doesn’t mean much if you have no idea how many people are looking at your website — or what they do once they’re there.
If your hotel website doesn’t have some kind of analytics tool set up, stop reading right now. Seriously. Open a new tab and fire off a message to your website developer or corporate office and get that sorted ASAP.
All set? Great!
Since Google Analytics is free and widely used, I’m going to refer to GA as a resource for this step.
Assuming your account’s been set up correctly, you’ll want to navigate into the Conversions tab, then select Goals and finally, Funnel Visualization.
This is the easiest way to get a visual of your own hotel website booking funnel, and see where exactly the most drop-off is occurring.
Some patterns are pretty normal, and we’ll address a few common ones in the next section:
Visitors landing on your website and immediately leaving could be the result of a slow-loading landing page, or one which failed to grab their attention above the fold.
Visitors who view multiple pages and then leave might not have found the information they needed to make their decision.
Visitors who check availability and then leave might’ve been turned off by price, or simply didn’t like the booking experience.
Visitors coming in from organic social media posts may just be looking for more information on the content you shared. (Always keep context in mind when looking at traffic sources…)
June 2023 UPDATE: If you’re looking for resources on using GA4 for hotels, stay tuned. I’m putting something together for you and it will go live soon! ;)
How to improve your hotel website conversion rate
As you’re looking into your hotel website booking funnel, you’ll start to notice some common patterns.
As is often the case with funnel marketing for a hotel, improving your conversion rate means addressing pain points and offering solutions.
Take a hard look at your hotel website and ask the following questions:
Do you know the purpose of every page?
Do you know where every page fits within the booking funnel?
Have you given the user a logical next step toward conversion (RFPs, direct bookings, etc.)?
Have you optimized that page for the right hotel SEO keywords?
Have you busted the most common barriers to booking?
1. Do you know the purpose of every page?
Your homepage isn’t always the first place folks land when they find your hotel website — nor should it be, if you’re actively using content marketing to drive traffic.
As a rule of thumb, your primary category pages (think: Rooms, Meetings & Events, Dining…) should stand on their own.
If I land directly on your Dining page, it should be because I’m interested in an outlet you have on-site, or a particular promotion or style of cuisine you offer. I shouldn’t have to go back up the funnel to your homepage to find what I’m looking for, eg. a menu, where to contact you, or how to book a table.
But, on that note…
2. Do you know where every page fits within the booking funnel?
The purpose of your Dining page is not likely to be “book a room.” For some hotels, your F&B outlets could very much stand on their own and will require a more localized marketing strategy to capture in-market diners.
For other hotels, your F&B could be more of a complement to your traditional Rooms or Meeting product. Great food & beverage adds to the experience of staying at your property, but it might not be the main draw.
No one approach is “right” or less valuable, by the way. As always, it depends!
Start with the end goal in mind (the conversion, whatever it is) and work your way backwards to figure out what content the customer needs to move through each phase of the marketing funnel.
Speaking of…
3. Have you given the user a logical next step toward conversion?
Now that you know the goal, what is the next step? What’s your call-to-action (CTA)?
One of the most common hotel copywriting mistakes many hoteliers make is not having a clear CTA wherever they need it.
Some basic CTAs your hotel may use include:
Book a Room
Submit RFP
Reserve a Table
Sign Up
Contact Us
Consider hotel wedding business, for example.
Many hotels shape a big portion of their annual hotel marketing plan around attracting wedding business. Weddings mean room blocks, catering, incremental revenue from add-on events like showers, rehearsal dinners, post-event brunches, etc.
And how do people plan and book weddings?
Well, not unlike the way we plan and book leisure travel… there are multiple steps along that decision-making journey, from dreaming to researching to planning and finally, booking.
The needs and pain points, however, can be quite different.
Optimizing your wedding-related website pages for conversion will likely mean driving someone to submit a request for a proposal (RFP) or to contact your sales team directly.
4. Have you optimized that page for the right keywords?
(I’m jumping around the booking funnel a little bit now, forgive me.)
When we talk about driving traffic to your hotel website, an important piece is whether or not that traffic is high-quality.
One acquisition strategy that you can own is using SEO to rank higher on Google for valuable keywords.
What makes a keyword high-value? Just three things:
High volume of people searching for it,
Low competition to rank for it, and
User intent that aligns with your page.
Let’s talk about that last one for a sec… What do I mean by “user intent,” exactly?
I mean the desired conversion: What’s the problem that visitor needs solving? What’s the action you want that visitor to take on your page?
When these two questions have the same answer, your page is aligned with user intent. (Hooray!)
Pro Tip: Get a copy of my free hotel SEO checklist and keep it handy while working on your hotel website!
5. Have you busted the most common barriers to booking?
The last piece of the hotel website conversion puzzle ties alllll of this together. 🎁
Where on your website are you LOSING the most customers? What needs to happen to win the conversion?
Here are some of the most common barriers to booking on a hotel website:
If they’re dropping off at the Top of the Funnel, it could be that you’re targeting the wrong keyword(s) or you’re bombarding the user with sales messages/pop-ups too early in their buying journey. This tells me your hotel marketing could be misaligned; you’re not attracting the right audience of travelers.
If they’re dropping off in the Middle of the Funnel, it could be that your website makes it too complicated to find the next logical step toward the desired conversion, you’re lacking the trust factor without social proof, or your page content is missing key information. Start by revisiting your web design and make it more user-friendly.
If they’re dropping off at the Bottom of the Funnel, it could be that your booking system doesn’t feel secure, or your price/availability doesn’t match up with expectations. Improve what you can control, otherwise, sit down with Revenue Management and make sure you’re on the same page about your rate, your target audience, and your marketing strategy.
At the end of the day, a hotel website that’s optimized for conversions is one that makes the booking process easy for the customer.
Easy to navigate.
Easy to find the information they’re looking for.
Easy to take the next step.
Hotel website design essentials: Watch the video!
Are you building a hotel website right now? Or looking for opportunities to improve your current one?
I think you’ll find this video tutorial helpful:
Optimization Testing: When to start and what to test
Speaking of next steps, here’s yours: START TESTING.
The best way to improve your hotel website conversion rate is to test and learn what works.
Get familiar with A/B testing or “split testing.” This is a simple approach to optimization which involves comparing two different variants to see which performs better.
Variants could be all sorts of things — you could test two different headlines on your page or test whether a pop-up vs. no pop-up results in more email subscribers.
If you’re running a promotion, try testing different version of your Facebook ads — test two different headlines or CTAs or even the image/graphic.
There are so many ways to test.
If you’d like to learn more about this, HubSpot wrote an in-depth guide to A/B testing. It’s a long read, but worth it if you’re looking for a more advanced understanding of how to optimize your website.
Otherwise, I suggest getting a bit more familiar with the concept in another way: Email.
Most popular email service providers come with built-in A/B testing features.
Try sending your next hotel newsletter with two different subject lines and compare the results — which one had a higher open rate? Learn from this test and apply it to your next email.
Final Thoughts
Traffic is an important metric but remember that “looking” doesn’t guarantee “booking.”
You can improve your hotel website conversion rate by understanding the basic booking funnel, knowing where you’re losing people, and making some strategic changes to address the most common barriers to booking.
What other questions do you have about optimizing your hotel website? Let me know in the comments below.