Hotels often experience something similar to this when their prospect guests visit their website but do not make any bookings. This aspect of hospitality businesses is measured as the “look-to-book ratio”.

Let’s understand this in more detail.

In today’s digital world, users always scrutinize every service and product they are likely to purchase. That is what travelers do while booking their accommodations. They surf through the internet, various hotel websites, and OTA platforms to find a perfect stay at an affordable price.

I bet you don’t want your hotel to be just a part of their surfing process. Rather you’d like the guests to stop by your website and find it a perfect fit to book.

However, earning an instant booking from your website visitors is not easy. You have to set up proper strategies to hold your guests’ attention and to even out your hotel’s look-to-book ratio effectively.

But worry not. In this blog, I am going to discuss it all step-by-step.

What Is the Look-To-Book Ratio?

As the name suggests, the look-to-book ratio (also known as the L2B ratio) is a comparison between the number of people who visited your website vs the number of people who made a booking.

This ratio is one of the key performance indicators for your hotel and its website. It gives a reality check of your website’s quality and tells you if it is effective enough to make good sales.

What is an ideal look-to-book ratio?

After understanding the look-to-book ratio, as a hotelier, you might want to achieve the best value of it. So, let’s address the real question now – “what is the value of an ideal look-to-book ratio for hotels”?

You might think it is 1:1 but it can happen only in hypothetical situations. It is clearly an unrealistic case where every person that visits your website ends up booking a stay.

To be honest there is not any particular value that hotels should run after. Instead, through constant efforts, they must try to improve their ratio day by day.

So, let's say your look-to-book ratio is 30:1. Meaning, out of 30 people visiting your website, only 1 is booking. Now your next goal can be 25:1 or 20:1. You can even aim to achieve 10:1 in the long term (though it is not a cakewalk).

Yes, it seems easy to write and read these values, but achieving them is a whole different game altogether. However, it is not impossible. And this is why I am here to guide you through perfect strategies to help you reach your goals.

How to Improve Your Hotel’s Look-To-Book Ratio?

To improve your hotel’s look-to-book ratio, the sole strategy is to make your online presence more appealing.

When your guests reach your website they should feel connected. If the website visitors can relate to your website, its content, and your property then you are halfway through.

In this section, I am discussing all the strategies you must note and follow to improve your L2B Ratio.

1. Make your website visible

If you want people to book your hotel, the primary step is to reach them. For that, your website should stand out from the pile of the internet ecosystem.

To do so, you must work on the content of your website. Research on the current customer behavior, how they search on the internet and other platforms, and what they are actually looking for.

In technical terms, note down the SEO keywords (search engine optimization) and include them in your website content.

By using effective SEO for hotels you will get acknowledgment in the search engine to become visible to the world. With time, you will start driving more customer visits to your website.

2. Track your target audience

Let’s just face the truth, you can’t please every visitor. What you can do is attract a particular niche. According to your hotel and its facilities, you must figure out what is an ideal guest persona for your hotel.

Once you track down your audience, you can use effective techniques to pull them in. You should know how to impress them on their first visit to your website.

As we know, hitchhikers and solo travelers will look out for a fun and carefree experience. Whereas families will look out for a whole package and comfortable stays.

So, to hold the attention of your ideal guest, your website should give them the particular vibe they desire. If they do not get excited about their stay just by looking at your website, then they will barely book you.

3. Keep your audience engaged

People do not always visit the hotel’s website to make a booking. Sometimes they just make future plans and casually lookout for travel and vacation spots. (To get that adrenaline boost:D)

In these cases, it is important to make an ever-lasting impression on your audience. They should have a strong image of your hotel so that whenever they plan to book, they will remember you.

To establish such an impact, you must connect with your audience personally besides the basic advertisements. For this, it is important to have your presence on social media sites. 
Recently, hotels are also using WhatsApp business tools to connect well with their guests.

Due to WhatsApp’s popularity among all segments of society, it helps in better reach. With its catalog tool, hotels are able to share their offerings with a single click. It helps build a strong pre-booking connection with guests, eventually resulting in an increased number of bookings.

Explore more benefits of WhatsApp Business 

4. Build an authentic and appealing website

One thing that users lookout in your hotel website is accurate information. While creating it, ensure you are not keeping the details vague and hidden. Always give out the full and right information to your visitors.

This unveils transparency and adds authenticity to your hotel’s image.

However, it does not come solely through the content, the design and color scheme of your website are also inclusive. These can seem to be the less important factors but the visuals do impact a lot on the conscious as well as the subconscious minds of your guests.

So, for bringing a genuine aura to your website, along with its content, you must build it with eye-pleasing and exciting visuals. 

An effective website builder software can help you do so. You can check out eZee Panorama, which helped many properties build their dream websites and improve their L2B ratio.

5. Keep the booking process smooth

Once you build an appealing website, ensure that it also functions smoothly. If there are a lot of hurdles while booking and getting its confirmation, then your website will instantly lose its charm.

The first thing you must look out for is an effective booking engine. It should be highly receptive and instant in terms of functioning. So that, your guest gets a wide range of platforms to connect with your hotel easily. Moreover, it should notify you immediately to track your bookings and assist your potential guests.

You can check out eZee’s Booking Engine which handles all these affairs ideally.

Besides this, the process of booking should be kept short and simple. Do not make your booking box a registration form for some entrance exam. Your guests may feel it is too extensive and may leave without booking.

6. Put up amazing offers

One of the prominent ways to improve your hotel’s look-to-book ratio is by offering great deals.

Your guests surf the internet just to find the best deals. So, if your website has reasonable prices and great offers for them then they will definitely book you.

This is why putting up different offers in festivals and seasons become important. Giving special offers on repeat bookings, discounts on group bookings, and great deals on packages – are some excellent ways to persuade your audience for booking.

7. Provide instant assistance

“Never keep your guests waiting!” This goes for pre-booking as well. The moment you put your guests on hold, you lose them, especially in the pre-booking phase.

Nowadays, people are reckless in terms of doing activities or taking decisions. Gone are the days when they used to have patience.

So, if they have any queries, you better guide them instantly, or else they will move on to your competitors in no time. It is important to be available for your guests whenever they contact you otherwise you lose a booking. This will eventually reflect on your L2B ratio.

8. Shield well from negative reviews

Reviews have become an important source for website visitors to check your hotel’s authenticity. Hence, it is necessary to manage them wisely.

If your prospective guest checks your website and reads a bad review then they become skeptical. It reduces your chances of earning a booking.

Therefore, keeping your website clean and sober in terms of reviews is a must. But it can get a little challenging too.

For making it easy, your hotel can use a reputation management system to deal with the reviews on your website. eZee also provides you with Free Review Response Templates so that you can respond to positive or negative reviews in an ideal and safe way.

9. Handle cancellations like a pro

One thing that can’t be overlooked here is when your guests confirm a booking with you and then cancel it.

Cancellations are the silliest way to lose your bookings. They snatch away your hopes for a better L2B ratio. However, it can be handled well.

If your booking terms are feasible and flexible to suit your guest’s requirements then there are fewer chances of cancellations.

Still, if it happens, you can earn it back by keeping the rescheduling window open for your guests. Or by asking about their genuine issues and trying to amend them.

The post Master the Aspect of the Look-To-Book Ratio for Your Hotel appeared first on eZee Absolute.

And there’s no hiding that Online Travel Agents (OTAs) are a major source for optimizing their online booking flow.

It is observed that OTAs control approximately 2/3rd of all online bookings.

Then it must be the best friend of hoteliers, right? Indeed! 

But with so many OTAs available, how do you know where to list your hotel? Which OTAs are the best? 

Well, every OTA is best in its own way; however, there are a few that might do a better job and deliver better results. 

So for all the hoteliers reading this blog, here I am sharing some of the best OTA platforms to increase your hotel bookings by manifolds.

Top 9 OTAs to Drive Maximum Bookings

I am listing below the prime OTAs in the hotel industry that can promote your hotel on a larger scale to drive maximum bookings.

Here goes the list:

1. Booking.com

Booking.com is recognized as the global leading OTA platform where more than 1.5 million rooms are booked on a daily basis.

It connects a wide spectrum of accommodations; from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts, tree houses, and even igloos.

Its website and mobile apps are available in 43 languages which helps accommodation providers to generate a worldwide network and enhance exposure.

But the real treat for hoteliers is that the listing process doesn’t charge you anything. You only get charged if a booking is successfully completed.

In addition, this platform showcases the booking info in a very clear way so that the users get transparency on every detail and policy. This helps establish a strong sense of trust among its users.

2. Agoda

With a strong emphasis on providing customers with cheap or discounted accommodation, Agoda is getting popular among travellers.

It can help your property business to stand out whether it is a hotel, hostel, or any resort. It is preferred for group bookings and packages because it offers flight + hotel bookings at low costs. Therefore, it is an ideal platform to attract international travellers.

Agoda is owned by Booking Holdings (which also owns Booking.com) and it charges between 15 to 20% on successful bookings.

3. Airbnb

Airbnb is a classic choice for small and local properties to boost their booking flow.

And if you look precisely at the contemporary picture, you will see that this platform is gaining popularity among big hotels too.

The reason that guests get attracted to the properties listed on it is – they are personalized, homely, and have a local connection. So if you have a well-furnished property, then Airbnb is the ideal place to land.

Airbnb might drive a few bookings compared to other mainstream OTAs but it ensures longer stays.

Also, it does not charge you money directly—it takes a cut out of every booking which is the lowest among other OTAs, typically 3% of the booking amount.

4. Hotelbeds

With more than 71,000 tour operators, travel agents, and airlines, and 50 million room nights sold annually, hotelbeds is one of the renowned names in the accommodation distribution space.

By listing your hotel on hotelbeds you get all the solutions and tools you need to maximize your room occupancy rates. Additionally, it also offers a wide range of marketing solutions and products that gets your property much-needed attention. Meaning, your hotel gets seen in the right place at the right time.

Over the years, hotelbeds has worked dedicatedly to build strong relationships at both ends of the travel chain to offer products, services, and solutions that help all its client and partners grow.

It can rightly be said that it is one of those platforms that can contribute significantly to maximizing your hotel occupancy and revenue. 

5. Cleartrip

Founded in 2006 as a hotel and air aggregator, Cleartrip is another popular OTA that accommodation providers shouldn’t overlook.

Being one of India’s fastest-growing online travel portals and with hundreds of partners from the travel and hospitality industry, the OTA provides access to a bouquet of offerings and enables people to take that much-needed vacation at attractive prices.

Upon its acquisition by Flipkart, the platform even participated in the Flipkart Big Billion Day event, which was like a travel shopping spree on the Cleartrip website and app as well.

If your hotel is in India and looking for a bundle of services to just boost occupancy but also increase revenue, then Cleartrip should be one of your go-to OTA.  

6. MakeMyTrip (GoMMT)

Established in 2000, MakeMyTrip is a household name in the Indian OTA space and over the years the company has strengthened its offerings extensively. 

It has more than 2.5 million daily users searching for hotels and homestays, making it the preferred OTA for accommodation providers. 

One of the events that made MMT one of the most preferred partners was its merger with Ibibo Group in 2017, making it GoMMT.

Today, GoMMT is a leading travel group in the country, providing a one-stop shop for all accommodation providers.

Whether you own a hotel, villa, resort, lodge, guest house, serviced apartments, hostel, homestay, cottage, or a BnB, you can list your property for free with MakeMyTrip & Goibibo and leverage its best-in-class offerings to maximize online bookings and bottom line.

If your property isn’t listed on GoMMT, there’s no doubt that you’re lagging. So, without further ado, get your accommodation listed on this sought-after platform. 

7. Expedia 

Expedia lures maximum travellers to its platform through the “Best Price Guarantee”!

Yes, it pulls out the cheapest deals for the consumers and hence they love it. And this is why the booking traffic is always massive on Expedia.

Adding to this, it provides everything in one place. Travellers can book their flights, hotels, or packages for their entire trip in one go at an affordable price.

With commission fees between 20% and 25% on bookings, it gives great exposure to increase your hotel presence.

Furthermore, as a fun fact, Expedia is one such entity that owns more than 200 travel booking sites, and over 150 mobile apps and websites worldwide. So, you must understand how this company is still a reigning leader. 

While it’s not practical to list all of them, here are some of the popular ones:

• Hotels.com
• Travelocity
• Orbitz

8. Trip.com

With Trip.com rewards (coupon codes and discounts), travellers get a chance to save on their bookings. This is why it has 400 million users worldwide. 

If an OTA has such a massive following then isn’t it the best match for your hotel? It is!

This OTA lets the customers buy their whole trip at one stop. Whether it is booking a hotel, flight tickets, car rentals, or holiday deals.

The commission rates are also flexible depending on various factors like your property size, location, duration of stay, and so on.

9. eDreams

In quarter one of the fiscal year 2023, e-Dreams reported 4.4 million bookings, which is the highest ever in a quarter and 50% up on bookings compared to pre-pandemic.

This rapid increase in bookings has a hidden fact that it offers up to 40% discount on its vacation packages (flight + hotel).

Here is a little more: If you list your property on E-dreams ODIGEO you can leverage the opportunity of getting exposure through 3 more international brands along with eDreams - Opodo, GoVoyages, and Travellink.

This can help you reach 18.5 million travellers in 46 countries. So think it over!

OTA Listing and Your Channel Manager Go Hand in Hand

Firstly, listing your hotel on OTA platforms can work only if you have a suitable channel manager at your property because that is the source to connect your hotel with any OTA.

With a channel manager, you update your inventory and rates on various channels or OTAs you are listed on. It automates the process of adjusting rates and room availability.

Now, to connect with any OTA platforms including the top ones mentioned above, you need to make sure that your channel manager offers the required integration to do so.

You can check out eZee Centrix, our channel manager, which offers integration with 130+ OTAs, GDS, and vacation portals. 

In addition to this, if you prefer any local OTA platform whose integration isn’t available then you can contact us and get it integrated with our channel manager depending on its feasibility.

The post Top 9 OTAs for Hotels to Boost Bookings appeared first on eZee Absolute.