Stages of the Booking Process: Booking S2E4

Foreign. Welcome to the Boost Hospitality podcast. My name is Mark Simpson. I'm the founder of Boost Hospitality, or boostly for short. This podcast is all about working with small independent hospitality owners, helping them increase their heads on beds, cutting down on commission costs, and just getting a better understanding how marketing for their Property works in 2017. In this series we are talking about the booking process and the stages and the steps that a potential guest will go through from the first moment they think about booking a property right up to after they've booked it and where they're thinking about cancelling. We're going to talk about everything in between, how you can influence the decision and what you can be doing on your website and on your listing sites to make sure that when the guest starts a search, they see you. And most importantly, book review. So far in the series we have covered the planning stage, the research stage and the deciding stage. Step number four is the booking section. And again, this is a really, really important part of the booking process. If you and your booking engine mess this up now, then there's no getting the guest back. So I'm going to walk you through exactly what you should be doing, what flaws you should be looking out for and how you can overcome them. Unless you've built booking engine yourself, then there's a very high chance that you are using one of the following free to book or a vivo little hotelier high level software. With each of these companies they have a booking engine that a guest can go onto from your website to book. Now it's really clear and really important at this stage that the most important factor that when a guest goes onto one of these booking engines is it needs to be mobile friendly. Believe it or not, there are some property management systems out there that have a booking engine that isn't suitable for mobile devices. As we all know now, people are using their mobile phones more than desktops, especially when it comes to booking a property. And this is why the online travel agents like booking.com and Expedia get so many bookings. A, because they spend more money than anybody else on advertising for Google, pay per click and other options. But B is that when a guest gets onto their website, they have everything so smooth and so easy to use, including the booking section. So you've got to try and make sure that your booking engine is doing the same. And if it isn't, you need to be moving quite simple. So what does a guest need in the booking stage? Quite simply, they need an easy process. If they have to be putting in their first Name, last name, email address, telephone number, they're the basics. That's all you need. But then there's some booking engines that ask for full address, check in time, special requests. Putting in the card information details is really hard. If your booking engine is doing that, then you are losing guests. And there's two ways to track if it is. Number one, you've got Google Analytics. Every booking engine has the ability to track at what stage of your booking process a guest is leaving your website. So go to your Google Analytics, go to your website, go to behaviors and it's called behavior Flow and it will show you on your website at what stage the guest is leaving your website to go somewhere else, which is really key. And it's really important that you're checking this. Now if you don't know what Google Analytics is or you've never used it, please get in touch. I can email you my Beginner's guide to Google Analytics as a video that I created and it's on YouTube so you can go find it on YouTube as well if you just type into a search engine Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics boostly. But it is so key that you get used to using that service because you will not know how your website is working without this and specifically the booking engine. Now, another thing to look out for as well is just to make sure that when a guest does get to the booking stage that it looks right. Make sure that the room that they're booking is the right room, pictures on there, you'd be surprised how many times that happens. And just make sure that the price is right, the cancellation policy is right, and that the option for them to put the card information in is easy to use, if you get this right, you will get the booking. But if you find, especially after you look at your Google Analytics pages, that you get say 100 people onto your booking section of your website, but then only 10 people are checking out. There's a high majority of people there who are not completing the booking and I can pretty much guarantee that they're leaving you to go to booking.com or Expedia to book somewhere else. So please get that right. If you need any more advice on this section. If you go to boostly.co.uk blog go down to the booking process. I have wrote about this in more detail. You can find all the information there. Again, if you'd like me to send it to you, just email markoostlee.co.uk and I'll forward everything on to you. Okay. Short, sharp and sweet. But that was episode four of season two of the Boost Hospitality Podcast, the booking process. I hope that you can get something from this. It's really important stage as a part of the process. Again, we'd love your feedback, would love your reviews. If you head over to itunes now, if you can write some words and rate us out of five star, that would be much appreciated. It's the only way that we will get more people onto this podcast is by you, the listener. So really do appreciate everybody that has gone out and left a review so far. Please spread the word. Final thing, if you could just text and tell one person about this podcast, that would make my day. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Boost Hospitality Podcast. I've created a free ebook to go alongside this podcast series. To claim your copy, all you need to do is go to boostle.co.uk podcast2 and that's the number two. And as always, Boostly is spelled B O O S T L Y. My name has Bean Mark Simpson. Thank you so much for listening. I' love to hear your feedback. Tweet me@Boostly UK.