Is your small hotel booking engine ready for mobile bookings?

As a small accommodation provider or hotelier, you may think that you don’t need to prepare your property booking engine for mobile bookings. You would be mistaken. To ignore the mobile trend is to risk missing out on valuable booking revenue.

The numbers are in – mobile travel bookings are here to stay:

Mobile phones are the #1 item to bring on holiday – (ETB News).

PhoCusWright predicts guests booking hotels via mobile will make up 20% of bookings through hotel websites – (Hotel Marketing).

52% of travelers used a smartphone or tablet to complete travel bookings – (JiWire).

How can you prepare your small hotel booking engine for mobile bookings?

Understand the guest who prefers to book via mobile.

Millennials tend to book more via mobile, and have high expectations of your website’s mobile friendliness. Expedia reports that 52% of millennial business travelers book on mobile devices.

Additionally, mobile bookings are usually last-minute:

• Orbitz and Travelocity reported that 60% of mobile hotel bookings happen within 24 hours of a stay.
• Priceline reports
  that the average mobile booker looks online for last minute deals, with 42% of mobile reservations on the past New Year’s Eve being made after 5pm.

Optimise your website and your booking engine for mobile.

Mobile device screen sizes come in all shapes and sizes, so from a technology standpoint your website needs to…

Use mobile web design. Think about it – how much room do you have available to you on a smartphone screen? Not much. This is why you must use lots of images, allow for easy scrolling, and make your buttons large and easy to click. It must be ‘responsive’, meaning your website automatically adjusts to any screen size. Your menu navigation also needs to be simple, with the most important information only a few clicks away.

Load quickly. Millennials in particular are extremely impatient when it comes to mobile browsing. If your site isn’t fully loaded within seconds, then they will most likely click away. Remember that because mobile bookings are usually last-minute, time is of the essence. No one will spend half an hour making a booking when another hotel’s mobile site will allow them to do it 10 minutes.

Partner with hotel channel managers that are optimised for mobile.

Your sales channels (ie. OTAs) are likely already mobile-optimised. For example, TripAdvisor created TripConnect – so that independent properties will be able to compete with big chains for instant booking transactions on mobile. This allows your guests to book through tripAdvisor without leaving their site.

Is your property’s booking engine mobile-optimised? Does your channel manager allow you to take bookings from TripAdvisor? Little Hotelier all-in-one system does. We connect you to TripAdvisor and 250+ other channels, and our booking engine is best-of-breed. Don’t take our word for it, take a free trial to see how it works.

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Looking for a PMS systems that will save you time and get you more bookings? Try Little Hotelier for free. You won’t be disappointed.