How to make your hotel's website turn visitors into guests
A guest on your website has already chosen to look at you. They leave when the price is hard to find, the page is slow on a phone, or booking asks too much of them, and many go back to a booking site to book the same room there. Each of these can be checked in a few minutes from your own phone, and each costs less to fix than the commission on the bookings that leave.
Also called: hotel website conversion rate, booking engine conversion, hotel website design, CRO.
A OneHorizyn guide. Updated .
Show the price before the guest has to ask
A guest who has to click through several screens to find a price compares you with a booking site that showed one at once. Put the price where they look:
- A box for dates and guests at the top of every page, not only the home page.
- A price from on each room's page, for a night in the coming weeks.
- The full price, tax and any fees included, before the guest gives their details, so that nothing is added at the end.
- Prices in the guest's own currency, if many of your guests come from abroad.
Google asks the same of a booking link from its hotel listings: that it opens on the room and rate the guest chose, shown clearly, on a page that loads quickly.
Open fast on a phone
Most guests look at a hotel on a phone, often on mobile data. Google measures how quickly a page shows its main content, how soon it answers a tap, and how still it keeps while loading, and publishes what it counts as good.
Google's mark for a good page: its main content shown within 2.5 seconds, a response to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout moving no more than 0.1 while it loads.
More conversions on travel websites when their mobile pages were made 0.1 seconds faster, in a study Deloitte carried out for Google.
- 1Open pagespeed.web.dev and enter your home page, then one of your rooms' pages.
- 2Read the result for phones first.
- 3Start with the largest photos: a photo uploaded straight from a camera is often many times larger than a phone needs.
- 4Check your booking page too. It often sits at another address, and is often the slowest page of all.
Few steps to book
- No account needed to book.
- Only the details you need: a name, an email address or phone number, and the payment.
- The ways your guests expect to pay. In India that means UPI as well as cards.
- A confirmation at once, by email and on WhatsApp if you use it.
More sales for redBus, the Indian bus booking site, after it made its website answer taps and typing faster.
Answer what guests ask, on the page
Before booking, a guest wants a few plain answers: where you are and how to get there, what the price includes, check-in times, parking, breakfast, the cancellation terms. If your website doesn't answer, they find the answer on a booking site and often book there. Put each answer in words on the page a guest would look at, with real figures: a ten-minute walk from the station, not close to transport.
Tell search engines what you are as well. Google asks websites to describe themselves with the most specific type that fits, which for a hotel is Hotel, and uses that description only when it matches what visitors see.
Show it is safe to book with you
- Your address, phone number and a named person to write to, on every page.
- Your rating and a few recent reviews, with where they come from.
- Your cancellation and payment terms in plain words, before the guest pays.
- A secure address, starting https, on every page and on the booking page above all.
Check your own website in ten minutes
- 1On your phone, on mobile data, search your hotel's name and open your own website.
- 2Find the price for a night two weeks away, counting the screens it takes.
- 3Book up to the payment page, timing it.
- 4Find the answers to the three questions your front desk hears most.
- 5Do the same on a competitor's website and on a booking site, and note where yours is slower or harder.
