A great hotel booking engine will help set your company up for increased direct bookings success and will play a considerable role in improving revenues per available room, client loyalty and SEO performance.

On the contrary, a booking engine or hotel reservation system which lacks key features or is poorly designed at either a UX or SEO level will have a detrimental effect on your ability to generate revenue from direct bookings. So, what are some of the key features a truly effective and user-experience-led booking engine must have? Read to find out and see how your existing booking engine for hotels measures up.

One of the key features of a user friendly hotel reservation system is the ability for users to check they are getting the very best deal on their hotel stay. That means making rate comparison an easy task for guests who want to check they are getting the best deal before confirming their stay.

The rate comparison tool from Digital Hotelier has been proven to increase ROI for hotels, as well as reducing instances of abandoned purchases. This is an effective tactic for reducing lost bookings by incorporating an element of pre-booking reassurance that guests are getting the best deal for their money. The hugely advanced Digital Hotelier rate comparison tool even gives hoteliers and hotel marketers a chance to analyse their performance over time with an inbuilt, comprehensive analytics system. If you are seeking a way to increase direct bookings and bolster guest confidence at the end of the sales funnel, then a rate comparison tool is an absolutely essential user experience upgrade.

A well-crafted booking engine for hotels must take into account not only the basic hotel reservation on offer, but also any additional add-ons and extras which can help customise your guests’ hotel stay. This serves to fuel greater interest in your offering and gives guests a sense of a more personalised and user friendly service.

Digital Hotelier’s booking engine for hotels offers this level of customisation as standard, allowing hoteliers to make the most of each and every opportunity to generate more revenue and make hotel guests’ stay that bit more special. Whether adding complimentary offers or upselling your rooms with the addition of meal deals or time-limited offers, the ideal hotel booking engine allows for all of these factors to be woven into the booking process with limited stress and disruption.

If your hotel booking engine looks distinctly different from the rest of your hotel website, this can be quite disorientating for visitors. The ideal, user-led hotel reservation system will take into account not only your users’ needs from a practical, information-led perspective, but aesthetically, too.  When designing a booking engine for hotels, the trust of your future hotel guests is paramount in truly optimising the experience – and ensuring they can book without the need to open new pages or visit a page which looks wholly different to the one they began their booking with is part of ensuring your hotel booking engine is in the best possible shape. Look for things such as identical URLs, personalised design and your own hotel branding.