Give your web booking system a makeover

In last week’s lessons from ecommerce for hotel websites, I shared some tactics you can borrow to improve your website’s effectiveness. Now I’d like to focus specifically on improving booking conversion rates. Again, this draws heavily from ecommerce, but the principles are just as useful for you.

Conversion Optimization 101

Simplify, simplify, simplify – each extra step or request for information is a chance for the person to abandon the process. Remove everything but the core essentials. Less is better.

Save the spiel – don’t spend a lot of time going through the details of your reservations policy. Today I used a hotel reservation system that devoted an entire page with over 800 words to explain the intricacies of their reservation procedure – ouch! Sure, you may have to remind us of the basics, but don’t get so wordy…and don’t take a separate page for it.

Reassure the customer – as your potential guest is finalizing the booking, you want them to feel good about their decision. The key: providing just enough information to accomplish this (not enough to distract them from completing the process).

Provide live help – it could be the difference between making the sale and losing it

Emphasize security – what technology are you using to protect online transactions?

Work everywhere – if you’re using advanced JavaScript or Ajax programming, make sure it works in all major browsers on all major platforms. A cool feature that works in Firefox on a Mac may not function in Internet Explorer.

Show progress – indicate where they are in the booking process, and how many steps are left

Fail gracefully – No availability? Give a solution: perhaps a phone number to call directly

What’s Your $300 Million Fix?

For one website, it was replacing a “Register” button with one that said “Continue.” You will never know until you test. Get testing software installed on your website, then always be testing.