New Room Hold Feature Brings Abandoned Guests Back to Direct Channel to Complete Bookings
NEW YORK, Nov. 15, 2016 – TravelClick (“the Company”), a global provider of innovative, cloud-based and data-driven solutions for hotels to maximize revenue, announced the launch of its new, interactive Booking Engine 4.0, designed to increase conversion and reduce guest abandonment with a transformative new reservation experience.
Booking Engine 4.0 is a user-friendly, responsive platform that drives direct bookings and incremental spend. The new platform is designed to optimize the user experience across devices and engage a growing mobile-first audience with increased spending power and travel bookings.
As part of the beta program, over 500 hotels worldwide have utilized the new booking engine and seen excellent results. Hotels that migrated to the new platform increased direct bookings by nearly 23 percent on average and saw a 155 percent increase in bookings on mobile devices – doubling prior mobile conversion rates. TravelClick also found that 44 percent of traffic to its clients’ booking engines came from mobile devices, demonstrating how important it is now more than ever for hoteliers to be set up for success on mobile.
“The new user interface is extremely intuitive and appeals to guests,” said Matt Black, Director of Brand and Guest Experience at One King West Hotel & Residence in Toronto. “The user interactions make Booking Engine 4.0 feel more like a mobile app, with instant feedback and lots of visuals. Images, icons and videos are prominent and incorporated seamlessly. As a result, instead of merely reading through the material, guests can actually see and feel what the hotel experience would be like. This gives us more opportunities to upsell and upgrade guests than ever before.”
Unique to Booking Engine 4.0 is the platform’s Room Hold option, which locks inventory and prices for up to 72 hours to reduce abandonment and continue guest engagement. The new platform also incorporates fully integrated high-definition video to entice users to upgrade and extend their stays. In addition, the booking engine has incorporated e-commerce best practices to simplify the booking process. For example, mobile users now have the ability to scan credit cards instead of keying in credit card numbers to make a purchase.
“Direct bookings grew more than any other booking channel in the second quarter of 2016 as hotel websites continue to be critical booking and marketing tools,” said Curtis Brewer, Senior Vice President, Reservations and Web Solutions at TravelClick. “While large brands invest millions of dollars into their Book Direct marketing and web strategies, it has been difficult for smaller brands and independent hotels to generate the same kind of results on their own. TravelClick’s Booking Engine 4.0 aims to solve this problem for hoteliers around the globe.”
