More bookings from the same visitors: conversion optimization for hotels

You already have visitors on your hotel site. The problem isn't that too few people come, but that too few of them actually book. That's where most of the gains are, because it costs you nothing extra.

The problem

Conversion is the portion of your visitors who actually book. Get 1,000 people a month on your site and 10 book, your conversion is 1 percent. The other 990 look, click once, and leave.

Most hoteliers and B&B owners focus on getting more visitors: Google, social media, ads. That's expensive and slow. Meanwhile, the site where those people land gets almost no attention. Say you have 6 rooms, your site gets 1,200 monthly visitors, and 12 book directly. You're passing dozens of people monthly who showed interest but dropped off on your own page.

That dropout is called a leak. And a hotel site usually leaks at the same spots: the page loads too slow, it doesn't work well on a phone, the visitor finds no reason to trust you, the booking button is unclear, or the booking form asks too much. Conversion optimization (CRO, systematically plugging those leaks) is about tackling those spots one at a time.

There's an important difference between getting more visitors and getting more from the visitors you already have. More visitors cost money repeatedly: each Google ad click you pay for, social reach you partly buy. Improving conversion you do once. You tweak something on your site, and then every visitor who lands there benefits from that improvement, month after month, without costing you again.

The beautiful part: a visitor you already brought cost you money or effort. Making them book costs you almost nothing more afterward. That's why conversion is the first thing you get right, even before you spend a euro on extra traffic. A leaky site filled faster just brings more people who drop off.

Calculation example

Here's why conversion matters more than extra visitors. Same 1,000 visitors a month, average booking value 240 euros (two nights at 120 euros each). The only difference between the two columns is your conversion.

Your visitor count doesn't change. Your ad budget doesn't change. Yet you get 15 extra bookings a month, or 43,200 euros in extra direct revenue per year. And these are bookings without Booking.com's 15 to 18 percent commission, so the margin is higher than your OTA bookings (OTA, an online travel agency like Booking.com or Expedia).

To get the same 43,200 euros in extra direct revenue through more visitors alone, with 1 percent conversion you'd need to more than double your traffic: from 1,000 to nearly 2,500 visitors a month. That traffic costs or takes months to build. Lifting your conversion from 1 to 2.5 percent takes a handful of targeted improvements to a site you already have. That's why CRO is nearly always the cheapest growth there is for a small accommodation.

Action plan

The levers for conversion are listed below in order of impact. Start at the top. A slow site that doesn't work on a phone chases people away before they even reach your booking button, so fix that first. The order isn't random: it follows the path the visitor takes. First the page has to load, then it has to work on their device, then they have to trust you, then they have to find the button, and only at the very end do they fill out the form. A leak higher in that chain makes everything below it pointless, so you start there.

1. Page speed. A site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load loses a big chunk of visitors before the page even appears. This is the first leak because no other improvement helps if people have already left. How to measure and fix this is covered in page speed of your hotel site.

2. Mobile. More than half your visitors look on a phone. If the booking button is below the fold or the form doesn't scroll smoothly, you lose those people. View your own site on your phone, not just the laptop. More about this in mobile-first design for hotels.

3. Trust on the booking page. The moment someone enters their details and card number, they look for reasons to proceed or not. Reviews, a clear cancellation policy, a secure payment seal and a real address make the difference. Which signals work and which backfire is covered in trust and urgency on your booking page.

4. Your call-to-action. The booking button (call-to-action, the button inviting action) must stand out, be on every page and say what happens when you click it. "Check availability" works better than a vague "More info". Details are in booking buttons that work for hotels.

5. The booking form itself. This is where most bookings that were almost done fail. Too many fields, a required account, an unexpected price at the end: each costs bookings. The nine most common errors and how to fix them are in the 9 errors in your booking form.

6. Good photos. People book a feeling, not a room. A dark photo of the reception and a bright photo of the view over the Friesian meadows don't deliver the same. Which images you need is covered in photos for your hotel website.

Common mistakes

• Changing everything at once. You tweak five things in one week and your conversion goes up, you don't know which one did it. Worse, one of those five might actually make things worse while the other four hide it. Change one thing, give it two to four weeks so you collect enough bookings to read something from it, then look at what happened.
• Optimizing for taste instead of data. "I don't like that button" isn't a reason to change something. What you notice often doesn't even register with the visitor. Measure where people drop off and fix that, not what personally bothers you about the design.
• Ignoring the big leak for a small detail. Making a button a shade bluer while your site loads in 6 seconds on mobile is mopping with the tap open. Follow the action plan from top to bottom because fixing something high in the chain outweighs many cosmetic details below it.
• Mixing up conversion with visitors. More traffic with the same poor conversion mainly means more people who drop off. Get the site right first, then bring in harder traffic. Otherwise you're paying for clicks you then chase away.
• Not measuring before you start. Without a baseline you never know if a change worked. Write down your current conversion before you tweak anything, otherwise you're improving blindly and can't back anything up later.
• Stopping after the first fix. Conversion improvement isn't a project that runs half a year. It's plugging one leak at a time, a cycle you repeat quarterly. Fix the biggest leak and the next one becomes your new priority by default.

What you can do now

Conversion optimization is one leak at a time, starting with where most people leave.

Do three things this week. One: view your site on your phone and count the clicks to a booking. Two: find your current conversion in Google Analytics so you have a starting point. Three: pick the highest leak from the action plan you recognize, usually page speed, mobile or the booking form, and tackle that first. Give that change two to four weeks and compare your conversion with the baseline you noted. See an improvement, you know the approach works and move on to the next leak.

The detailed breakdown per item is in the separate articles: the booking form, your booking buttons and trust on the booking page. Calculate first what this earns you via the savings calculator.

Prefer someone to look at your site with you and have it fixed? We discuss that at marketing for hotels.