The Steps to Success
The online booker craves visual
information. The more photos, videos and Virtual Tours they can
find of your properties the better.Providing easy search capabilities that quickly give the user results and
allow for further drilldown if necessary is critical. In general, a larger
inventory of properties generates more searches. More searches mean more user
interaction and usually more online bookings – Put all your units online!
Most successful sites provide
multiple entry points to their inventory. In addition to a quick search on the
home page you should have several pre-defined “buckets” (preferably with
associated images). These buckets could be organized by lifestyle, special
needs or property attributes ( E.g.” Golf Homes”, “Pet-friendly Condos” or” 4
or More Bedrooms”).
The property is not the only
factor for a travel consumer. Weather, airfares, mapping and distance to points
of interest and facilities is other very important information used to make a
purchasing decision. Making that information available in the property search
context (not through external links) is critical.With the advent of so called mashups,
many sites offer interactive maps that display the information geographically.
The concept is equally important for vacation rental sites.
Common Challenges
Many traditional reservation
systems have limited search screens, more focused on the reservation agent than
consumers needs. They are inflexible and cannot easily be “blended” with the
rest of the website’s look and feel (many times they use different types of framing
technology). Getting access to and incorporating weather and airfare data is
not trivial and may carry large costs if done on a one by one basis.
Interactive maps require that each property
is geo-coded which can be
a complicated process.
How Bookt Can Help
The Bookt platform comes with an
extremely flexible search engine. As an administrator, you can easily save and
publish advanced searches to your website that are relevant to your specific
users.
Bookt provides intelligent
widgets that can be embedded seamlessly on your site to display things like
weather and airfare. What’s even more important is that they are context aware. Here
is an example: A user from Cincinnati, OH enters a site that showcases
properties in Aspen, CO. The site automatically displays airfares for multiple
airlines from Cincinnati to Aspen and shows the typical weather in Aspen in the
month the user intends to book in.
Every listing entered into the Bookt system is automatically
geo-coded.