Podcast: Stages of the Booking Process: The Booking
This episode is all about the actual booking process. If you and your booking engine mess this up now, then there’s no way to get the guest back.
What is the Booking Process? There’s a very high chance you’re using freetobook, eviivo, or another automated booking engine. These companies have a booking engine that your guests can go to from your site.
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The most important factor is that it needs to be mobile friendly — there are some engines out there that aren’t suitable for mobile devices, and we all know that nowadays people are using their mobile phones more than their desktop.
You have to try to make sure your booking engine is doing the same as the OTAs. What the guest needs in the booking stage are an easy process. They should fill in the basics, such as the first name, and email. Make sure they only fill in the essentials. At this stage, you don’t need to know their arrival time and full address.
Another good thing to know is that every booking engine has Google analytics. Go to your Google analytics, and go to your website, go to behaviours, and behaviour flow. It will then show you where on your website that the guest is leaving the website — make sure you are checking this. You will not know how your website is working without this.
Another thing to look out for is to make sure that when a guest is booking that they’re booking the right thing. So, make sure the price is right, the booking cancellation is right, and the input of the card information is easy to use. If you get this right, you will get the booking. But if you find, especially after using Google analytics, that you get 100 people on your booking site, but only 10 bookings go through, that means they’re leaving your website and instead go to an OTA where it’s easier for them to book. Enjoy this, grab all the episodes from the series by clicking here
