How To Create A Simplified Booking Experience For Repeat Guests

Here’s how you can go the extra mile for your regular guests, creating a simplified booking experience that’ll keep them coming back for more.

An integrated booking engine

Your hotel website should always have an integrated booking engine – sending guests to an external site to finish off their reservation can be very off-putting for them. Plus, integrated booking engines come with a multitude of operational benefits that you can leverage when enticing guests back for repeat stays.

Automated emails and promotions to previous guests

As well as configuring automated thank-you emails to previous guests, your hotel booking engine will have a feature to send out special offers and promotional codes via automated emails for their next stay. These incentives could be based on fixed discount or a percentage off their next stay – either way, it’s an incentive for them to book with you again.

One-click payment

Nobody likes the time-consuming process of filling in forms with credit card details and there are trust concerns for some consumers when sharing private information such as payment details during the hotel booking process. Fortunately, one-click technology now exists, where users can store their credit card details securely and authorize payment quickly and easily. This makes the booking process itself fast and simple, while maintaining optimum security for sensitive information.

Have a responsive booking engine

Give your repeat customers the ability to make those repeat bookings on-the-go with a responsive booking engine that adapts to any device. Whether they’re using a mobile, a tablet, or a desktop, the booking pages will appear streamlined and simple, rather than cluttered and messy.

Loyalty schemes

One of the best ways to encourage guests to book with you again is to come up with a loyalty scheme that rewards returning customers. You might offer them a free night for every five bookings they make, or money off evening meals, spa treatments and other extras you may have available. If you don’t currently have a loyalty scheme, it’s worth asking for feedback from your existing clientele, so you can establish what types of rewards would most incentivize a repeat booking.

Allow social network integration for faster checkout

This links in with one-click payment. Rather than going through the long process of filling in all of your details, users can simply integrate one of their social networks with the booking engine. The engine will then extract the information it needs from the social network (Facebook, Google+, etc), filling in names, dates of birth, email addresses and other such important information that is required to make a booking.

If you’re interested in hotel reservation system software that will help you simplify the booking experience for return guests, get in touch with the Digital Hotelier team today.