ONLINE BOOKING TRENDS TO WATCH FOR IN 2015
Hotels should monitor market and traveler behavior trends to take full advantage of the growth of online booking
January 14, 2015
This past year marked a watershed in the development of hotel online booking. With both business and leisure travelers turning to their computers, and, increasingly, mobile devices to make their travel arrangements, a number of trends have emerged, each indicating a preference of how users approach online booking. During the next year, hotels will need to identify and react to online booking trends to maintain market share. The key trends that hotels should pay attention to in the coming year are:
Growth of OTA. Online travel agents such as Expedia saw a 15% growth in bookings over the year, based on estimates in a recent Phocuswright report. . With OTA crowding out individual hotels in search results, some OTA are conditioning higher commissions in exchange for better rankings, often driving down net yield. To respond to this trend, hotels will need to explore innovative online promotion campaigns to attract potential guests directly to the hotel's own website instead of hoping for a high ranking on a basic “price-and-availability” search on a Google or “travel metasearch” website.
Rise of boutique online travel agents. A counter trend to “do-it-yourself” online booking has been the increasing popularity of independent, small-staff travel agents without a “brick-and-motor” presence. Many of these agents attract clients needing to make complicated arrangements or seeking luxurious and highly personalized travel experiences. Hotels can capitalize on this trend by working with boutique agents to sell high-value-added packages.
Move to mobile payment: The wide adoption of smartphones triggered a migration of online bookings from desktops and notebooks to mobile devices, with mobile bookings growing from 5 to 20 percent of all bookings since 2012. The coming year will see credit cards superseded by the more-convenient online payment providers such as PayPal for mobile bookings. This trend will require hotels to cultivate and maintain good working relationships with one or more payment providers to ensure that bookings are not lost to a competing hotel because the potential guest preferred to use an online payment service for security or convenience reasons.
Importance of online reviews: A survey by TrustYou indicated that travelers are 3.9 times more likely to choose a hotel with higher review scores when the prices are the same. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that most travelers will not bother to post a review of a hotel offering only “satisfactory” service. To ensure an adequate presence on social-media sites, hotels most provide guests with a memorable experience (such as a staff member demonstrating resourcefulness to fulfill an unusual request) and be proactive in soliciting guest reactions through post-departure emails and surveys.
Personalized web experiences: Customized travel arrangements have been the norm for a generation, and 2014 saw travel websites adopt sophisticated techniques to personalize user interaction. In the coming year, hotels will use emergent data manipulation technologies to extract and correlate data from their own databases and social media postings to generate personalized promotional emails and other online modes of contact with previous and potential guests.
