Mr. Tarasofsky

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

The Wired Hotel: Catering to the Casual Visitor

By Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO, iPerceptions Inc.

In my last article, I touched on the importance of optimizing your website so that it would feel like a second home to your higher frequency visitors, who inevitably tend to be higher volume travelers and thus compose a highly attractive, high value segment (see The Wired Hotel: Pleasing Your Higher Frequency Website Visitors). Equally significant, however, is the flip side of the coin. Infrequent visitors can sometimes get short shrift when too much effort is devoted to catering to the needs of repeat visitors. The factors that will add value to the online experience for repeat visitors - storing of travel history, updated counts of rewards program points, storing of AAA membership numbers - will only be of incidental significance to the infrequent set. With this in mind, I'd like to touch on some strategies for making your site as effective as possible at converting on booking intent for infrequent visitors.

This is an equally important proposition for hospitality website decision makers, but one that is not without complexity. We know empirically that the infrequent visitor and the seasonal traveler are often one and the same. Data pulled from a study running on the website of a major economy class hotel chain, which operates several well-known brands, provides insight to that effect. The share of visitors who were onsite for the first time constituted 50% of the total sample in July 2007, a figure that was up 11 percentage points from February 2007. Given that these lower-frequency July visitors were onsite during the peak summer travel season, it is unsurprising that 34% were onsite to book a reservation.

Converting on these intentions to book is of paramount importance. Certainly, the importance of effective visuals cannot be overstated. It begins with the room itself, but by no means does it end there. The greater the breadth and the range of the catalogue of hotel pictures, the better. Seasonal visitors may have never set foot inside of one of your hotels, and now they are entrusting you with their accommodations during a family get-away. It is therefore imperative to ensure that they get as much as they need in the way of visuals.

Looking beyond the visuals, however, two of the leading barriers to conversion that our research has identified among first-time visitors (with intent to book) center around two themes of confidence. Firstly, 17% were not confident enough in the online reservation process and indicated that they would prefer booking over the phone. Secondly, 16% were not confident that they were getting the lowest possible price.

I'll touch on the first booking inhibitor a little later on in the article. The important point that warrants consideration here is the fact that many visitors falling into this persona bucket (first-time visitors who travel seasonally) will likely have already gleaned some information about the price point of your hotel rooms (and/or those of your competitors) from the ubiquitous online travel agency sites, such as Travelocity or Hotwire.

Certainly, the online travel agencies have been a tremendous boon to lower-volume travelers, both in terms of breadth of selection and in terms of convenience as a one-stop-shop for trip booking needs. Visiting each hotel brand's website individually may be perceived by the web user as a pointless expenditure of energy. Thus, something extra has to be there to reward the visitors for doing the leg-work; the visitor should be incentivized for by-passing the online agencies and going directly to your brand's website. While it may not always be possible to achieve price parity with the online agencies, the hotel website owner must at least ensure that the booking process is functionally sound.

Let's come back to the first barrier to conversion mentioned above: the fact that a sizable chunk of visitors felt more comfortable with the telephone booking process. On the surface, this would appear to be linked to concerns about sending sensitive information (addresses, credit cards, etc.) over the Internet. A look at the open-ended commentary from this survey reveals, however, that this is not the case. Indeed, there is surprising silence about privacy concerns in the stream of open-ended commentary, perhaps attesting to the fact that most hotel brands have been very diligent in clearly marking their secure socket layer (SSL) certification on landing pages.

So, what steps can be taken to ensure that visitors do not eschew booking online in favor of a phone call? Before I touch on this, consider the danger of this interceding step in the booking process. After closing the browser, a visitor may very well intend to phone in to book a reservation later that day, but circumstances can often get in the way and a commitment may be forgotten simply because something more pressing has come up. There are two other obvious reasons why the phone-based booking is sub-optimal; one is the fact that this escalates to call-center resolution and issues that could and should easily be handled online, and the second is the fact that you lose the ability to track this booking as a click-through or view-through conversion and, if this reaches critical mass, you are robbed of data that could influence decisionality.

Minimizing the number of clicks from entry to site through confirmation of booking screen is critically important. This can be done by deploying search tools that produce timely results with minimal latency. Searching on your site should be a quick gateway to a booking screen, not a painstaking exercise in sifting through results of questionable relevancy.

An issue that arose surprisingly frequently in open-ended visitor commentary surrounded room availability. A visitor should never be presented with a situation where they see that a room is available - only to find out several clicks later that in fact is it not. Effective synchronization between the front-end interface and the back-end database can ensure that this will never happen.

A further element that is sure to make the booking process more agreeable for lower-frequency visitors is a useful local map tool. Visitors who travel only seasonally may not know very much about the area they are going to; certainly they would not have nearly the local knowledge of higher-frequency travelers, who are well acclimated to the road. So, make sure that your maps do a good job of allowing visitors to orient themselves in the city/region they plan on visiting. This includes mapping distances to local landmarks and tourist hotspots in a clear and legible fashion. The last thing you want is for your visitors to have to keep Google Maps or Mapquest.com open in a separate tab while they are attempting to book.

There are other factors in play that could hinder a smooth and functional online delivery. We know both anecdotally and from personal experience that the task of booking hotel reservations for a summer vacation is often undertaken from home, where sources of distraction are copious and the time window may be very tight. Navigating an unfamiliar site under these constraints can be difficult, and any portion of the site that is not optimized for user-friendliness can trigger reservation abandonment. Referring back to the data from July discussed above, we find that, among first time visitors with intent to make a reservation, one of the leading reasons why the booking process was abandoned was interruption (19%). As an aside, anyone looking for a unique but realistic way of running a usability study on their website might consider having the test participant evaluate their pages with an impatient four year old tugging at their arm.

Jerry Tarasofsky is CEO of iPerceptions Inc. Its webValidator® "captures the voice" of the online customer, helping companies learn more about their customers. Using a comprehensive perceptual framework to evaluate key elements of the visitor experience and, algorithms and modeling to identify attributes that drive satisfaction. The webValidator solution turns data points into easy-to-understand strategic and tactical decision support. iPerceptions’ clients in the hospitality sector include Crowne Plaza, Omni, Savoy, Wellesley, Homestead, Radisson and Holiday Inn. Mr. Tarasofsky can be contacted at jerryt@iperceptions.com Extended Bio...

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