Insider: The Wired Hotel: Hotel Website Visitor Segments - Business or Pleasure
By Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO, iPerceptions Inc.
Mr. Jerry Tarasofsky
They are two well-known but utterly distinct hotel website visitor segments: business and leisure travelers. One is composed of hard-working professionals in need of accommodations; seasoned travelers whose minds are focused on sales, partnerships, and acquisitions, and for whom a comfortable night’s rest is critical. The other segment is composed of pleasure-seekers, seasonal or holiday travelers for whom the hotel stay is but one part of the larger experience of vacationing. Whether you operate an economy, midscale, or luxury hotel website, satisfying both of these visitors is critical to your value proposition.
Our study results show several characteristics that distinguish the two groups from one another. True to the travelling demands of their working lives, business travelers are more likely to be onsite to book a reservation than leisure travelers. Leisure travelers, for their part, are usually onsite to research and compare hotels rates or to gather hotel information.
In addition, leisure and business travelers demonstrate widely different website and brand loyalty patterns. Business travelers are more likely to have bookmarked or favorited a hotel website, while leisure travelers rely more heavily on search engine results to guide them. Close to 60% of business travelers are participants in hotel rewards membership programs, while 30% of leisure travelers express uncertainty about their likelihood to ever join a rewards program, and 15% indicate that they are flat out not interested in signing up for membership.
As you will read in my article "Hotel Website Visitor Segments - Business or Pleasure" in the Hotel Business Review, at an aggregate level, leisure travelers come out narrowly on top in the realm of online customer satisfaction, but business travelers show evidence of stronger booking and task completion metrics. The article will detail which areas of the website pose the greatest challenges to maintaining customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ROI among these two segments.
It is my hope that these findings can help you to better optimize your website for both of these groups.
Click here to read the full article
Sincerely,
Jerry Tarasofsky
CEO
iPerceptions Inc
877-796-3600
http://www.iperceptions.com
