Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Transformation Strategy (145-slide PowerPoint presentation). Digital Transformation is being embraced by organizations across most industries, as the role of technology shifts from being a business enabler to a business driver. This has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thus, to remain competitive and outcompete in today's fast paced, [read more]
What Does Your Hotel Booking Website Need to Improve User Experience?
Also, if you are interested in becoming an expert on Customer-Centric Design (CCD), take a look at Flevy's Customer-Centric Design (CCD) Frameworks offering here. This is a curated collection of best practice frameworks based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. By learning and applying these concepts, you can you stay ahead of the curve. Full details here.
* * * *
User experience (UX) is so important to websites these days and if business owners don’t spend time and money on perfecting UX, their profits are going to drop considerably. If you run an online hotel booking system and you’re looking to improve the experience for your clients, consider the following ideas.
Increased Website Performance
The first step should be to ensure the website is quick and page loading times aren’t slow. Increasing your website’s performance could be the difference in your customers booking another hotel down the road, so ensure you spend time increasing the speed. This can be done by optimising images, investing in one of the best web hosting providers with better hardware, or even revamping the site altogether with better coding techniques – there are plenty of tasks you can do to increase site performance.
An Easier Booking Process
If your booking process has too many steps or it’s not well coded, it’s not going to be very easy for customers to make a booking. Consider taking steps out of the process or increasing the performance of the form itself by re-coding it using better coding practices. Look at this helpful guide that will point you in the right direction when it comes to increasing the user experience during the booking process.
Improved Form Validation
There are always things you can do to improve the form validation stage of the booking process. When you’re requesting a client’s email and personal details, give them a helping hand by ensuring they insert the right data before they submit it. The use of JavaScript would prove to be handy in this instance, so users can have instant access to error-reporting.
Ask Your Customers What You Can Do to Improve
There’s never anything wrong with asking your previous customers what they thought of the booking process. Ask them how well the booking form worked and if they had any problems entering data. This will give you an idea of what needs improving to boost the whole booking process. You can send out emails to your previous customers to ask them for their help and in return, they can have a small discount on hospitality services.
The Inclusion of a Booking App
The software or scripts you use for the booking process will determine how you go about creating an app. However, if it is a viable option for you to do so, a booking app could really help your mobile users. It would save mobile and tablet users from having to go on their laptop to book if responsiveness of booking forms on a mobile device isn’t that great. This will increase user experience considerably and it’ll also give you the chance to get more custom.
The steps you take to improve user experience will depend on how serious you are about your business. The above steps are just some of the key elements that could prove to be the difference in your business failing or succeeding.
56-slide PowerPoint presentation
Customer Experience is fast becoming the key business battleground in many markets.
In order to be successful it is critical that all business create a Customer Experience Strategy, an all encompassing view of how they will deliver superb experiences to their customers. Having such a strategy [read more]
Want to Achieve Excellence in Customer-Centric Design (CCD)?
Gain the knowledge and develop the expertise to become an expert in Customer-Centric Design (CCD). Our frameworks are based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. Click here for full details.
In the modern Digital Age, advances in technology and communication, combined with the explosive growth in data information, have given rise to a more empowered global customer. Recent economic and political events highlight the need for organizations to understand how consumers view the world and the most important attributes for their purchasing decisions.
Thus, increasingly more organizations are seeking to invest and focus on Customer-centric Design. A clear understanding of customer needs and behaviors across the organization will help drive profitable growth strategies and provide the confidence to invest in opportunities at a time when staying within budget can be extremely difficult.
Learn about our Customer-Centric Design (CCD) Best Practice Frameworks here.
Readers of This Article Are Interested in These Resources
225-slide PowerPoint presentation
[NOTE: Our Design Thinking presentation has been trusted by an array of prestigious organizations, including industry leaders such as Apple, MIT, NASA, Ford, Boeing, Fujitsu, Syngenta, Palo Alto Networks, and Mercer, to name just a few.]
Design Thinking is [read more]
|
|
143-slide PowerPoint presentation
|
|
35-slide PowerPoint presentation
| |||
About Shane Avron
Shane Avron is a freelance writer, specializing in business, general management, enterprise software, and digital technologies. In addition to Flevy, Shane's articles have appeared in Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine, among other business journals.
