Stages of the Booking Process: Deciding S2E3

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. If you have not yet listened to episode one and two of our Boost Hospitality podcast of season two, go back now and download it. Because we are following a theme. We are talking about the five steps of the booking process, what your guests are going through before they decide to book with you. Step number three, decide. The guest has done their planning, they've found a website that they want to go and potentially book a property on. They've done the research, so they've checked reviews, they've seen your photos, they've seen your facilities, they've seen your price. Now, this is the most important step, in my opinion, because it's getting them to go from thinking, yes, that is a property that I like and it's now going to. This is a property that I want to book at. So what do I mean? So the guest is on your listing site or it's on the website. They like your price, they like your pitches, but they just need something just to tip them over the edge. What can you do on your website and what are the booking engines, for example, booking.com or Expedia, what are they doing so well to get people to go from being potential booker to being a booker? First and foremost, what you need to have in here is to make sure that your availability is matching up to their needs. So if your property has the dates and it is not syncing through to the booking engines, etc. Like booking.com and Expedia, then you're going to confuse the guest and they're going to go somewhere else. So first and foremost is please make sure that your property management system is synced up properly to your booking engines. Next, you've got to make sure that you're not overpricing yourself and underpricing yourself. So make sure that your room rates are on point. You can do that by doing a little bit of research by looking at what other people in your town or city are charging that are similar to you and you can match it accordingly. Don't forget for popular dates throughout the year, bank holidays, for example, holidays, maybe there's events that are going on, make sure you adjust your rates accordingly because you're going to have more of a need on these dates than in the quieter periods. Next, you've got to obviously make sure that your reviews are being responded to. So if a guest has been leaving a review that you've got a management response next to, this is a really important factor that guests go through because before they make that booking, before they go to the partner and say I found the perfect place, they're going to be checking to see what your current and past guests are saying about you. But, but more importantly what you as the manager are responding back. So if there has been a complaint for whatever reason, they want to make sure that you as a manager, as an owner, as a property is responding and just to let the guest know that it's being fixed or it's been sorted. Really important key. Finally, what the booking sites like booking.com and Expedia do so well is to get a guest from the deciding stage to the booking stage and is that they clearly put in fear of loss. And you can see this right now. If you go onto booking.com for example, go do like a generic search and try and find a property. As soon as you get onto these search results it will say this is a popular location, one room left. Book now or you could lose it forever. They really hype up that fear of loss. So make sure that on your website you, you can incorporate that as well. Now you may not be able to go down to the levels that they do because they've got very sophisticated systems, but you can on your website have your latest reviews. You can really build up the social proof and you can simply have on there, you know, limited room available in popular dates. We're a very popular location, we get booked up quickly. Make sure you book now you can have that in your text that the guests are seeing for the room details, for the property details. So this is a really key part. Now the copy that you use, the availability, the back end systems, if these are all working well, then you will get a guest to go from being a decider to a booker. If you don't, then they'll leave you and they'll go to somewhere else because they haven't been given that incentive to book. One final nice little key thing for your website, try and invest in pop ups and more importantly a pop up that will appear on your website that clearly states that if they book with you they will get the best rate or they'll get an extra incentive. One of the main reasons why people book on the OTAs is when they get onto their sites they do a really good job of making sure that a person doesn't leave without booking. So you've got to try and do the same on your own website to get that direct booking. Now, pop ups are annoying, yes, but they work and they work for a reason. And if you have a very clever one on your website, one that doesn't appear until 5 or 10 seconds of browsing on a specific accommodation page, you're going to boost your chances of getting that guest to stay on the website. But most importantly, go to your booking page. For example, there's a company called Sumome, they've got free pop ups and it's a freemium service, so it's free to start with. If you like it, you can pay a monthly subscription of about 30 to 40 pounds month, which is nothing if you compare in the return of investment. But you can set up a pop up to appear just before the guest leaves your website. So just as the guest has seen all the information, they're thinking, I'm 50, 50, I just got to go check. They go to click the exit button, a pop up appears saying if. Did you know that if you book your property with us directly, you get the best rates, you get an earlier check in and going somewhere else and you also get a free bottle of wine on arrival. That in itself will help tilt somebody over from the deciding section to go to your booking page. Start to think outside the box. Start to think about what you can do. There's some really cool tools out there. If you want any further help, email me. It's markoostley.co.uk.

Thank you for listening to the Boost Hospitality podcast. I've created 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 been Mark Simpson. Thank you so much for listening. I'd love to hear your feedback. Tweet me Oostleyuk Sam.