What is hotel conversion?
Hotel conversion is the process of turning potential customers—such as website visitors, online searchers, or inquiries—into confirmed bookings. It measures how effectively a hotel can convert interest into actual reservations.
The process by which you do this can take many forms and this blog will take you through everything you need to know.
Table of contents
Why are booking conversions important?
Booking conversions are crucial for your hotel because they directly impact both your revenue and occupancy rates. When a potential guest completes a booking, it means one more room is filled, contributing to your hotel’s bottom line. High conversion rates show that your marketing efforts are working effectively to turn interest into actual stays, which is the ultimate goal for any hotel.
Moreover, focusing on booking conversions ensures that the traffic coming to your website or booking platform is fully capitalised on. Every visitor represents a potential guest, and if they leave without booking, it’s a missed opportunity for revenue. By improving your conversion rates, you can increase direct bookings, which are often more profitable since they reduce or eliminate the commission fees charged by third-party platforms.
Additionally, strong booking conversions contribute to a more predictable and stable business model. When more visitors convert to bookings, it means less reliance on aggressive discounting or last-minute offers to fill rooms, which can erode profitability. Consistent conversion rates allow you to better forecast occupancy and manage revenue strategies more effectively, leading to a healthier financial position for your hotel.
In the competitive hospitality industry, optimising booking conversions is key to staying ahead. A higher conversion rate not only means more revenue but also reflects a strong brand presence, a user-friendly booking process, and a compelling value proposition—all of which contribute to long-term success and growth for your hotel.
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How to calculate conversion rate in hotels
To calculate the conversion rate in hotels, you need to determine how effectively your hotel is turning website visitors or inquiries into confirmed bookings. Here’s a simple formula you can use:
Conversion Rate = (Number of Bookings/Number of Visitors)×100
This results in a percentage, where the higher the number, the better the conversion rate, and the better your hotel’s performance!
What is a good hotel website conversion rate?
The average hotel website conversion rate is between 1.5% – 2.5%, according to HotelTechReport. However, there are numerous tools available that can help to push these numbers even higher.
How to improve conversions on your hotel’s most important landing pages
Conversions are key not only to the success of your online marketing campaign, but also to the success of your hotel property.
But many hoteliers do not realise that specific landing pages on their hotel website are more powerful than others — such as the payment page.
In fact, travellers from across the globe are beginning to abandon their bookings on the payment page if it fails to function in the way they expect.
- Two-thirds of travellers from the United States become apprehensive if they are redirected to a different portal to complete the payment process; and,
- About 20% of German travellers will abandon their booking if they begin to have security concerns.
Building trust and reducing abandonment
Security concerns are real and justified, as it seems there are credit card security breaches being reported nearly every day.
If you are asking your hotel guests to provide their credit card information over an online payment portal – which is becoming the industry standard – you need to provide your guests with clear and certain proof that their private financial information is safe with you.
Promote the fact that you are PCI DSS compliant, as this means that you follow the industry standards for securing and processing payments online.
Include mouthwatering benefits
Reinforce the fact that your hotel offers guests a plethora of benefits so that guests are more convinced at the payment stage.
Instead of describing basic facts about the hotel, enhance the content so that it spells out exactly what those amenities mean for your guests.
For example, your hotel might have an adults-only pool, a children’s vacation club and beach access. Instead of listing these amenities as bullet points, you could describe them like this:
- The hotel features an adults-only pool, allowing you the time you need to escape from the chaos of family time.
- Our children’s vacation club gives your precious little ones the opportunity to make memories that will last a lifetime, while you get some much-needed rest and relaxation.
- Private beach access means that you will spend your evenings strolling along the beach, soaking up the gorgeous sunset without dealing with the crowds.
Leveraging remarketing
It’s impossible to convert every site visitor into a customer, but it is possible to pull many interested visitors back to your site in order to encourage them to finalise their bookings.
Thanks to remarketing, you can target specific ads at people who have already visited your website, and increase the chances of getting them to book direct.
When they begin to see your hotel pop up during their regular internet activities, they will be more likely to come back to your website and complete their booking.
For example, if a potential guest visited your site, viewed your ‘King Suite’ room page, and left without making a booking, then you can retarget them with ads of the ‘King Suite’ on their Facebook page, and even offer them 5% off to sweeten the deal.
Your internet booking engine is the key to conversions. Make sure it is fully optimised for mobile and provides a seamless booking experience for every guest who wants to book directly.
Key hotel website conversion metrics for hoteliers
Even after you have worked hard on search engine optimisation (SEO) at your hotel, you must run periodic analysis to track improvements. But with so much data available when analysing your hotel’s website statistics, it’s easy to focus too much on just conversion rates and hotel sales figures.
Understanding the importance of each data set can be challenging when you’re trying to gain valuable insight. To help with this task, here are some important metrics – that are sometimes overlooked – to give you crucial information about your website performance.
1. Track your high traffic web pages
A good first step is to find out what your most popular website landing pages are – first impressions last! You want the highest ranking pages to be as attractive as possible, with relevant content for your prospective hotel guests and a clear call to action.
Think of your landing pages as your first job interview. If it’s interesting enough guests will check out other pages, if not you’ll lose them right there and then. If one of your most visited landing pages is your home page, make sure you provide enough information about your property such as star rating, location, property images, services offered, options to book now, and anything else that can showcase your hotel.
2. Acquire actionable data from exit pages
As important as understanding where your traffic lands on your website is, you must know at what point you’re losing traffic too. Exit page statistics are very useful in finding key areas of improvement on your website.
For instance, it’s a bad sign if travellers are exiting from a page that’s involved in your hotel’s booking process. Your website should be easy to navigate and give your guests flexibility to explore, it should also give them clear instruction and call to actions throughout your pages – leave no room for doubt.
Make sure your high ranking exit page has this covered. If the content is irrelevant or if you have any technical issues, such as broken links, review the overall online experience for this page and adjust what is necessary.
3. Maximise engagement on your website
When it comes to online traffic, focus on quality over quantity. ‘Bounce Rate’ is an essential metric to analyse your traffic quality and engagement levels.
You can measure the percentage of visits in which the user had no interaction with the page and left the website. A number of factors can affect your bounce rates, so take some time to analyse where the traffic is coming from.
If you find you’re running a hotel marketing campaign with high bounce rates, check that the landing page has relevance to your campaign, and that your audience segmentation is correct, as you may be delivering paid advertising or emails to the wrong people.
4. Zero in on your hotel’s target markets
One of the most useful pieces of information when analysing your website statistics is your ‘Audience Geographic Localisation’ report, which takes into consideration your visitors’ IP addresses.
Cross-checking this data with other metrics will give you powerful insights and could identify potential new markets to invest marketing dollars in.
Try to identify untapped markets with higher conversion rates and lower traffic rates, and target this market during your hotel’s next online campaign.
Also check for areas of your website with higher traffic and below average conversion or high bounce rates and investigate areas for improvement in this region, for example; content translation.
Raúl Amestoy,
Assitant Manager
Hotel Gran Bilbao
The significance of hotel conversion tools
Hotel conversion tools such as a booking engine or payments solution are important for a number of reasons including:
Increased direct bookings
More direct bookings mean fewer commission fees paid to OTAs. That’s more revenue for your bottom line as well as a reduction in your hotel’s reliance on third-party booking sites, de-risking your growth strategy.
Enhanced customer experience
Conversion tools allow hotels to provide a seamless, user-friendly booking experience for their guests. With the data and extra functionality they provide, they can customise the booking process to align with their brand and meet the unique needs of their guests. This can greatly enhance the guest experience and contribute to customer loyalty.
Improved efficiency
These tools can automate many aspects of the booking process, such as sending confirmation emails, processing payments, and updating room availability in real-time. This can save hotel staff a significant amount of time and reduce the chance of errors.
Greater insights
Many hotel conversion tools come with analytics and reporting features. This allows hotels to gain valuable insights into their booking trends, customer behaviour, and overall performance. They can use this data to make more informed decisions and improve their operations.
Stronger guest relationships
By enhancing direct booking conversion rate, hotels have the opportunity to build stronger relationships with customers. Conversion tools help the business to capture important guest information during the booking process, communicate directly with the guests, and personalise their experiences based on their preferences, driving returning guests and thus revenue.
Competitive advantage
In a competitive industry like hospitality, having the tools to create a user-friendly, efficient, and well-branded online booking system can give a hotel a significant edge over competitors who don’t offer such a seamless experience.
Top hotel conversion tools hoteliers use to increase website conversions
The digital landscape of the hospitality industry is constantly evolving, and hoteliers must keep pace to ensure they maximise their online conversions. Achieving a robust conversion rate — the percentage of website visitors who become booking guests — is a high priority.
From tracking visitor behaviour and analysing user interactions, to managing online reputation and providing real-time chat support, these diverse tools can offer valuable insights and enhance the user experience.
1. Website visitor tracking tools
Website visitor tracking tools help hoteliers understand how visitors interact with their website by tracking their behaviour and actions. These insights can include information about which pages the visitor viewed, how much time they spent on each page, what they clicked on, and at what point they left the site.
These web conversion metrics can then be used to optimise the website and make it more user-friendly, thus improving the conversion rate. These tools often incorporate features for segmenting visitors based on their behaviour, which can then be used to deliver personalised content or offers.
2. Website heatmaps and behaviour analytics tools
Website heatmap tools provide visual representations of how users interact with a website. They show where users click, how far they scroll, and what they look at or ignore. They’re different to website visitor tracking tools in that they are more focused around behaviour once someone is on a page and can provide more detailed insights than most website visitor tracking tools.
This information can help hoteliers identify popular areas and elements on their website that attract user attention, as well as areas that might be causing confusion or hindrance to the user journey. Based on these insights, website design and content can be optimised to improve user experience and conversion rates.
3. Online reputation management tools
Online reputation management tools are used by hoteliers to monitor and manage their hotel’s online reputation. They track reviews and ratings across various online platforms and provide alerts for new feedback, allowing hoteliers to respond promptly to both positive and negative comments.
These tools can also provide insights into common customer complaints or praises, helping hotels to improve their services based on customer feedback. By managing their online reputation effectively, hotels can increase customer trust and improve their overall image, which can lead to higher website conversions.
4. Online web chatbot tools
Web chatbot tools provide real-time interaction between the hotel and website visitors. They can be used to answer queries, provide recommendations, and assist with the booking process, making it easier for potential guests to make a decision.
Some hotels use AI chatbots for basic queries and have human operators for more complex discussions. The immediate response and personal interaction can significantly improve the user experience and increase conversion rates.
These tools, from tracking visitor behaviour and visualising user interactions to managing online reputation and providing real-time chat support, all contribute to enhancing your hotel’s conversion rate. They provide crucial insights, personalised engagement, and improve the overall user experience on your website.
However, not every website platform will have the capability to integrate and utilise these tools to their full potential. Often, hoteliers will only discover the limitations of their chosen platform once they have already invested – which makes choosing the right partner from the start absolutely essential.
