Fuel Hotel Marketing Podcast: Episode 131 – Is It Time To Re-Evaluate Your Booking Engine?
Let’s face it, your booking engine is one of the most important pieces of your marketing strategy. According to the Fuel 2019 Leisure Travel study, 87% of consumers will visit the hotel website prior to making a booking, meaning that if you have a great booking experience, you have a great chance to convert the guest to a direct booking. Why then is it that folks look at the booking engine as a commodity and rest their laurels on an antiquated or ineffective system? In this episode, we dive into a few things you should be considering when you think about whether or not it’s time to evaluate your current provider.
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SHOW NOTES:
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STAT OF THE WEEK:
50% of hoteliers are not satisfied with their current booking engine provider:
1. Does your booking engine provide you with the analytics you need?
- Do you have the ability to integrate with Google and/or Adobe Analytics?
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- How does the integration happen?
- Provide GA account number
- Back end access to paste script
- Give us access to tag manager container we control
- We provide script
- We provide every detail of how to track your booking engine and do your job for you
- Will it take more or less than a lifetime to achieve this integration?
- What data can we access?
- Basic page tracking
- Basic ecommerce tracking
- Custom dimensions like dates, booking window, package name, room type, revenue
- Does the engine accurately attribute revenue to the original source?
- Do you have the ability to add custom tracking pixels (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook, etc.)?
- How?
- We provide scripts
- Back end access
- Tag manager access
- How much will this cost?
- Can you support CORRECT tracking of a global search engine and separate engines?
- Is there one point of contact who knows all of this information, or will a team of rocket scientists and brain surgeons be involved to figure it out?
2. Does the booking engine provide a good user experience?
- Does the booking engine not suck?
- Is it obvious to the user how to continue to the next step of the process?
- Does it have the same look and feel as the website?
- Does the booking engine live on the website domain or does it live on another URL or subdomain?
- Is the mobile experience kickass?
- Is the search functionality super-fast?
- Is the date picker intuitive and mobile-friendly?
- Does it have a favorite/compare feature?
- Does it have urgency and social proof messaging?
- Does it easily allow the guest to see the best rates/packages with minimum effort?
3. Is the booking engine partner supporting you and your business?
- Do you have a dedicated contact person who knows your business and is responsive?
- Does the provider proactively offer advice on how to improve your performance?
- What is the process to get technical support and does support happen quickly?
- Do you get nickel and dimed for every request?
- Are updates to the system included in the price?
- How often are features added?
- What is on the feature roadmap and can you provide input?
- Are there any other fees or charges?
- Are you locked into a long term contract?
4. Does your booking engine play well with others?
- Does it have integration with TripAdvisor and GHA?
- Does the booking engine provider make it easy to integrate with other tools such as flip.to, and theguestbook.com?
- Does your booking engine offer an API?
- Does it integrate directly with the PMS rather than a CRS?
5. Will your booking engine get you sued
- Does it meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards?
- Is it PCI compliant?
- Does it meet GDPR & CCPA standards?
6. Does your booking engine not suck?
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