8 Tips for more direct bookings to your hotel website

Here are a few simple tips that will help increase direct bookings on your website, convert that pent-up demand and reclaim more share from the OTAs

1. Check your Web-Booking Engine

Flexibility is key in times of the Pandemic so guests feel at ease to make a booking
Test the complete booking process yourself on a regular basis
- Is it easy to make a decision or do you need to read too many long winded offers?
- Can you streamline your offers?
Reducing your offers to 3 or 4 will result in higher conversion because guests are not overwhelmed by choice.
Have clear guarantee & cancellation policies

Ensure your Hotel website is fully responsive
Mobile bookings are the fastest growing channel
Make a booking from your mobile to check the booking engine is dynamic, responsive and delivers the guest experience you expect it to deliver
Ensure all images & text display as expected
Work with your booking engine provider if you want functionality added that might not be enabled as yet on your site

Check and update the short and long destination keywords to maximize organic positioning in search engine results.
Refine meta-tags, page titles and links and continue writing topical blogs

Review the bidding clause in your OTA contracts
Send your hotel’s trademark to Google and other search engines so they can block OTA advertisements using your hotel name or brand.

Bid for keywords on the hotel’s name to drive traffic directly to your hotel website and away from 3^rd parties.
Use cookies to pop-up banners on visitors to your brand website

Target pop-ups and email re-engagement campaigns re-open the communication channels with visitors who have started but not completed a booking on the hotel website

Post-departure emails inviting guests to review their stay on your hotel site or well known review sites such as Tripadvisor, Holidaycheck, Google+
Manage reviews through an online reputation management tool such as Review Pro, Revinate or TrustYou
Respond to all reviews. Remember this is not a job for the summer intern, but a senior manager
Give structured feed back to all departments and work on areas of improvement because many efficiencies & improvements can be made by just listening to your guests
Display the hotel review results on the hotel website to show guests’ opinion. Guests will have trust in your hotel, when they see what others experienced

Have a business listing on TripAdvisor and display direct hotel rates in price comparison sites such as Google, Kayak, TripAdvisor, Trivago and others.
Customers do like to buy directly from a hotel and seeing the same or better rates in a Meta search result, makes it easy to book directly on the hotel website.