Business Strategy
How Independent Hotels and Attractions Win More Direct Bookings
Guests who cannot book what they want on your site, on their phone, in under a minute will book it somewhere else or call. Both cost you.
Your booking engine is your best salesperson. Make sure it can sell everything your front desk can.
Every independent hotel, resort and attraction faces the same trade-off. Online marketplaces bring guests, but they charge for each booking and keep the relationship. Your own website keeps both, but only if guests can actually book there, quickly, on a phone, for exactly what they want.
When they cannot, two things happen. Some leave for a marketplace. The rest pick up the phone, and your front desk spends the afternoon taking reservations a website could have handled.
This guide covers how to audit your booking flow, sell more of what you offer online, stay up when demand peaks, and move routine phone reservations to self-service.
Audit your own booking flow
Do this on your phone, on mobile data, with a stopwatch:
If the standard booking takes more than a minute, or the common requests cannot be completed at all, you have found your first fixes.
Sell everything your front desk can sell
Front desks sell far more than rooms and tickets. Your website should too.
| What guests want | What the booking flow needs |
|---|---|
| A package, such as a room with breakfast or a show | Bundles priced and inventoried as one item |
| Add-ons, such as parking, late checkout or rentals | Add-ons offered during checkout, with their own inventory |
| The whole property or a block of rooms for a group | A group path that books several units in one transaction |
| Several ticket types in one visit | One cart that holds every ticket and add-on together |
| A reason to book direct | Perks visible on your site, such as flexible changes or a welcome amenity |
Every item you add online is a phone call you no longer take and a sale a marketplace cannot match.
Be ready for your biggest day
The worst time for a booking site to slow down is the moment your demand peaks: a holiday weekend, a ticket release or a television mention. Guests who hit an error rarely come back to try again.
Move routine calls to self-service
Track why guests call for a month. In most properties, a handful of reasons dominate: changing dates, adding a guest, asking about parking or availability, and requesting a receipt. Each one can move online:
Keep the phone for the conversations that need a person, and give the person on the phone the same booking tools the guest sees.
Pitfalls to avoid
What to measure
By the numbers
Published industry case studies from software firms show what fixing the booking stack has delivered. The figures below are self-reported by the firms that published them, and each describes a single project rather than an industry average.
Booking website capacity at a resort operator, without degradation
Before: 3,580 requests per minuteAfter: 15,000 requests per minute
Self-reported results from case studies other software firms have published. See Sources & method below.
- 80%less manual work per trip at a whale watching and sport fishing operator after moving to online booking
- 60%less phone traffic at the same operator, credited to a better web experience
- 3 monthsto integrate a new payment processor into a hotel group's property system, where an internal attempt passed 11 months unfinished
Self-reported results from case studies other software firms have published. See Sources & method below.
Where does your team sit? The 14-day Ops Efficiency audit measures it. Book the audit
Your roadmap is three bookings long
Run the phone audit above this week and write down the three bookings guests ask for that your site cannot complete. Then ask the front desk how many calls those three generate in a typical week.
That short list is a better roadmap than any redesign brief. Fix the most common one first, measure the calls it removes, and move to the next. For more on connecting booking and property systems, browse the blog.
Sources & method
- Resort and indoor waterpark operator, booking website hosting and scaling — published case study (Emergent Software)
- Sport fishing and whale watching operator, online booking and back office — published case study (Atlas Solutions)
- Hotel group with 4,300+ properties, payment integration in a property management system — published case study (Xperity)
Figures are self-reported results from case studies other software firms have published. Delta did not produce these results. Where a source says “up to”, so do we.
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