What makes a good Internet Booking Engine (IBE)?
A user-friendly and powerful booking interface can increase the conversion rate, improve customer loyalty and increase your hotel’s revenue. You can find out which criteria are relevant in addition to an intuitive and transparent booking platform in our blog article “What do you need for a good internet booking engine?” (link to blog post).
What are add-ons and additional tools?
Add-ons are additional modules or features that can be added to an Internet Booking Engine to enhance its functionality and provide an improved booking experience. These add-on modules can include a variety of features that benefit both bookers and hoteliers. By implementing add-ons, the Internet Booking Engine can be customised to the specific needs of users and the market, which can lead to higher customer satisfaction and an increase in bookings.
What additional modules do you need for a good booking screen?
A hotel price comparison shows the best price.
To ensure that your hotel is booked directly on your website, it should be the cheapest there. It is therefore advisable to include a price comparison on your homepage and also on your booking screen to support this. With price comparison modules, you can give your guests the certainty that they have already found the cheapest offer on your hotel website. This not only pleases the guest, but also saves time and you as a hotelier achieve more direct bookings.
If you accidentally find that your hotel website is not cheaper than other booking channels (such as Boooking.com, Expedia and others), clever price comparators can help. Make sure that your price check shows the booking platforms on which you are selling cheaper as “fully booked” – or even better, doesn’t show them at all.
Booking portal for hotel groups and chains.
Do you have a hotel group or chain and want to display your bookings clearly? Make sure that your provider can offer an overarching and, above all, clear availability query for all your hotels or holiday flats. With just one click, you have an availability and price check for all hotels in your group – multi-property, so to speak. This makes it easy for your customers to find and book the right hotel for their next trip. From there, the user is redirected to the individual hotel internet booking engines and ends up exactly where they want to go. A separate booking portal for your hotel group, so to speak.
Crossselling shows the availability of other hotels.
Is your hotel fully booked? No problem. But you don’t have to lose your potential bookers. With special cross-selling modules, you can also display the availability of other hotels and send your guests to partner hotels if necessary.
Well protected with cancellation insurance.
Hotel cancellation insurance protects the guest in the event that a cancellation is necessary. The correct insurance premium should be displayed automatically during the booking process so that the guest can select the cancellation insurance with just one click. The advantage for you: Most travel insurers pay commissions to hotels for every insurance policy sold. Integrating travel insurance into your Internet Booking Engine is therefore worthwhile in any case.😉
Different languages for different bookings.
Willkommen. Welcome. Bienvenue. Velkommen. Benvenuto. Is your Internet Booking Engine only available in German and English as standard? But your core market is somewhere else in Europe or even Asia? Make sure that your booking screen is offered in the languages relevant to you and that you integrate the appropriate language modules.
Even after integrating a new language, you should check whether everything has been displayed correctly in your booking screen. As different characters are used in some languages, this can also lead to different displays in the Internet Booking Engine..
Find the right category with a filter.
Do you offer both holiday flats and hotel rooms and don’t want to display both in one booking screen? Then we have a helpful tip for you. You can use the higher-level category filter so that you still only have to integrate one booking screen. Bookers have the option of pre-selecting their desired accommodation category and still have full transparency throughout the entire booking process. This not only means a high degree of flexibility for your guests, but also for you. You can display a wide variety of categories in just one booking engine and customise your own categories.
e commerce tracking leads to an optimised conversion rate.
Do you actually know how successful your Internet Booking Engine is and how many conversions it achieves? If not, then you should urgently start doing so. How else do you know if you are successful? With the integration of external tracking tools (e.g. Google Analytics) you can find out exactly that. Only with figures, data and analyses can you raise your online marketing to a really good level. Whether you want to measure Adwords campaigns or social media activities is up to you. With the right strategy, you can make the right adjustments to increase your conversion, generate more sales and establish your direct bookings as the undisputed number one online channel.
Simplicity in data retrieval for faster booking.
We’ve all been there… you finally want to configure your holiday and at the end you have to enter a huge amount of data. We understand that as a hotelier you want to find out as much as possible about your guest, but why don’t you ask for this after the booking on your Internet Booking Engine? As a hotelier, you should ensure a pleasant but also quick booking experience. Therefore: Please only ask for the really important data when making a direct booking.
All optional data that is still of interest to you as a hotelier can still be requested in the next step after the booking has been made, giving you food for your email marketing. This way you minimise the hurdle for the guest to actually complete the booking and still get your data. While we’re at it: Look out for providers that also offer an automatic address search so that it is really quick for your guest and possible typing errors can be avoided.
Automation is everything. Especially when it comes to data transport.
If you use a booking widget on the homepage of the hotel website to ask guests when they want to arrive and how long they want to stay, you should make absolutely sure that the guest journey continues seamlessly. If the guest then clicks on “Book” or “Reserve” to be redirected to the booking screen, the information already requested should already be taken into account in the Internet Booking Engine. Otherwise, the direct booking is already under a bad star. You don’t want the guest to select something full of anticipation and then realise that the room is no longer available.
Technically, of course, this doesn’t work by itself. You need an interface between your Internet Booking Engine and the small widget on your hotel website. Talk to your service providers. Both the provider of the IBE and your advertising agency will know what to do.
Once again in a nutshell.
There are certainly many other additional modules. We have listed the most important ones for you today. Now it’s up to you to make the most of them. With add-ons like these, you can ensure that your Internet Booking Engine is not only functional, but also user-friendly and competitive. We wish you every success with the optimisation and lots of fun with the add-ons.😉
