Here's the bottom line for your direct conversions: hotels make more money when guests book directly. When they go through an OTA, commission percentages usually vary from 15-25%, and you lose that money. This means that encouraging guests to book directly through your hotel website is in your direct interests, and is one of the key steps to increasing profitability.

In many cases, when searching for accommodation on an OTA, the customer will visit a hotel's own website – to "double check", or look for more images or reviews. This creates an opportunity for the hotel to capture the sale.

Simple? Not quite – You need to tailor your website to convert visitors to customers.

Research shows that the design of your website is vital for conversion.

As a hotel, your website is your first impression, and where your conversion opportunity lies – designing your website for conversion will let you secure direct bookings and reap the rewards in the bottom line.

The conversion rate is a key metric for any website; it's become much more than just another industry buzz word in recent years. In order to deliver healthy margins, hotels need to move towards "conversion-centred design", rather than just what looks good (although we recommend that too!).

The principles of good website design remain the same, whether it is a large website or a landing page. Crazy Egg puts it simply:

'You aren't actually interested in a better looking site. You're interested in a high-converting site.'

When your potential guests land on your site, your design needs to capture that visitor and get them to book direct.

Oli Gardner, Co-Founder & Creative Director at Unbounce, has outlined 7 principles of conversion-centred design to consider. We've broken it down for you and your hotel site below:

1: Encapsulation

Direct your visitor's eye towards the most important part of your website.

For hotels, this is your availability search box to drive direct bookings. Focus your potential guest towards your call-to-action (CTA).

You can use the tunnel vision effect to draw the eye, and grab your visitor's attention.

2: Contrast

If want to make your call-to-action stand out, it's contrast that counts. For example, if you have a page that is primarily green-hued, a red button will jump out.

Use contrast on your "Book Now" button and other major conversion buttons on your pages so that your main conversion target is dominant.

3: Directional Cues

Make it easy for your customers to find their way to where you want them to go.

Use directional cues, like arrows or a visual pathway to direct the line of sight to an end goal that you want them to reach. If you want to boost your direct bookings, you want to highlight your availability search button to guests.

source: http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/design-principles-increase-conversions/

4: Whitespace

Less can sometimes be more.

White space (or blank space), is an area of emptiness surrounding an area of importance.

The purpose is to use simple spatial positioning to allow your CTA to stand out from its surroundings by giving the eye only one thing to focus on.

Simple yet effective.

(See what we did there?)

5: Urgency and Scarcity

Source: screencapture from Net Affinity's booking engine

By implementing psychological motivators such as "urgency" and "scarcity" on your website, you can influence the demand for your hotel rooms.

Proximity to the conversion goal of the landing page is key when it comes to signalling scarcity. By ensuring your visitor understands that they have a deadline, you can make that click a little more likely.

For example, use encapsulation to highlight the scarcity statement – "Only 3 rooms left!"

Link this with a softer unique selling point (USP), such as "No Booking Fee" or "Best Rate Guaranteed", to ensure your guest feels they got the best deal available.

6: Try Before You Buy

Trust boosts conversions.

A preview of quality can help people make informed purchasing decisions. For example, have a video, image slideshow, or wedding testimonials from past customers. This creates instant trust and legitimacy in a customer's eyes, and it can be an important factor in boosting conversions.

The guest will feel sure that they are making an informed purchasing decision, and be more likely to book direct. A conversion-centered design should have creative ways to present these previews.

7: Social Proof

As we've said, trust is critical in customer conversion. Trust building elements should be part of any design – social proof is a great way to deliver independent feedback for you and your potential guests.

Testimonials are a common approach, and you can encourage your site visitors to read the great things your previous guests have said about your hotel through smart content design. Adding an explanatory headline above the testimonials (or customer logos etc.) can increase the power of social proof.

Customer behaviour is evolving, and people have more and more access to social proof. Revinate.com explains the change in behaviour:

'In addition to visiting the hotel websites, [customers] will also read online reviews. Online reviews present another opportunity to draw customers to your own site, rather than having them return to the OTA to book.'

Responsiveness is Key

When applying the 7 principles above, you need to make sure that all your hotel's website design features are focused on converting visitors to customers – especially optimised responsive design for mobile devices.

As mobile traffic continues to grow, responsive website design has reached near-critical importance.

However, a highly responsive mobile site delivers limited value if the conversion-centred focus of the desktop site is diminished in the optimisation. Quicksprout.com identifies the real question from a conversion standpoint when optimising a site for mobile devices as: what do I keep, and what do I trim away?

With a smaller screen, in order to take full advantage, greater consideration is required on which conversion elements are necessary, and which are just a bonus.

The "less is more" whitespace concept is often helpful when you optimise for mobile.

Conversionxl.com outlines 5 things to keep in mind when optimising responsive design for mobile conversions:

1. Focus on the important and make sure that the first thing your mobile visitors see is your value proposition.

2. Make your calls-to-action stand out in accordance with mobile user behaviour

3. Make use of photographs and videos

4. Cut down your forms

5. Use expandable content or tabs to avoid mobile scrolling

To sum up: direct bookings increase your bottom line, but as a result of poorly designed or unresponsive websites, many hotels are not fully capitalising on it.

The aim of your website is to encourage guest conversion. This can be achieved through smart, conversion-centered design with the goal of redirecting guests from OTAs. OTAs offer a multitude of choice and comparison that can lead to your hotel missing a sales opportunity, so you want to move potential guests to your own site, where you have the opportunity to encourage loyalty and upsell.

By following the 7 principles and optimising your desktop and mobile potential, you can capture site visitors and turn them into your guests.

Net Affinity is an Independent Digital Agency providing Revenue Generating Solutions for Hotels. Our services include Website Design, Digital Marketing and Booking Engine Technology. Our culture of award winning design and innovation together with a keen eye for emerging trends allows us to deliver services that directly impact on growing revenue for our clients. As experienced hoteliers we have a genuine and wholehearted passion in providing a complete customer centric service to our customers. We pride ourselves on the development of a relationship that allows us to nurture your business and ensure our success is your success.

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