Showcase your properties & hotel rooms
The Steps to Success
The online booker craves visual information. The more photos, videos and Virtual Tours they can find of your properties or hotel rooms 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 or hotel room inventory generates more searches. More searches mean more user interaction and usually more online bookings – Put all your units online!
For Vacation Rentals specifically, the 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”). Similarly for hotel websites, the user must be able to search through room categories and attributes easily and quickly.
The property or hotel room itself is not the only factor for a travel consumer. Weather, airfares, mapping and distance to points of interest and facilities are also important pieces of information used to make a purchasing decision. Making that information available in the property or room 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, hotel and resort 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.