Partner Article

5 Ways to Increase Online Bookings

148.3 million travel bookings are now made online each year. This is a huge number – but how do you make sure you’re getting your fair share of this revenue?

Travel companies have a lot to consider when trying to stand out from the competition – but the main issue is finding your Unique Selling Point (USP) and getting this across to your potential customers. Once you know your USP and what sets you apart from the competition, how do you let people know about it and how can you increase your sales?

The following 5 steps can help you to increase your online travel sales:

1. Improve your SEO so that customers can find you

This may sound obvious, but SEO is a complicated business. In an industry as competitive as the travel sector, you need to be at the top of your game so that potential travel customers can actually find you when they’re looking to book their holiday. Appearing at the top of Google rankings is not an easy task – but there are things that you can do to help improve your Google rankings. Make sure that you regularly post useful, relevant content on your website that can be easily shared on social media. A blog is an ideal way to do this. You also need to make sure that relevant search terms are included in your web pages – both in the text that your customers read and in the meta descriptions and title tags (if you don’t know what these are or how to amend them – ask your web developer for the information). Another useful SEO tip is to add alternative text to images on your website as Google cannot ‘see’ your images. By describing your image in the alt text as accurately as possible it will increase the chances of your images appearing in Google Image search.

2. Ensure that your website is mobile friendly

So you’ve improved your SEO and you’re now ranking highly in Google searches. Out of the 148.3 million travel bookings which are made online each year – more than half of these are made on a mobile device. Having a mobile-friendly website for your travel business is vital. If your potential customers cannot use your website on their phone/tablet, they will move to a competitor’s website where they can do this. Try the free Google Mobile Friendly Test now to see how your website performs on mobile devices. If it is not mobile friendly, then it is time for you to update your site.

3. Give your customers a great user experience

How many times have you landed on a website, waited a few seconds for it to load and then given up? Or got frustrated and left a website because the information you needed wasn’t available within a few clicks? People want convenience and ease of use. They expect the information they need to be available at their fingertips in an instant.

You need to consider a few things to give your customers a positive experience so that they ultimately book their holiday with you. Firstly, make sure that your website is fast – there’s nothing worse than sitting watching progress bars as a website tries to load when you’re excited to book a holiday! If your website is slow – you probably need to look at where your site is hosted. There are so many cheap hosting options available – but you do get what you pay for. Always make sure that you check the hosting reliability and uptime guarantees, as well as the capacity and scalability.

Another thing that can cause long page loading times is the content on your site – such as large images and animations. Try this useful Website Speed Test tool to check the performance of your site and see if you need to make some improvements.

4. Make your online booking process easy

[Happy Travel Customer] This may sound harsh – but we live in a world where people don’t really like picking up the phone anymore! Most people just want to find the information they need online and make a purchase or booking without having to speak to anyone at all. A simple booking process is an essential part of a travel website and if you don’t allow customers to book online (or your booking process is very complicated) then you are likely to be missing out on revenue.

5. Give your customers something extra

The travel market is a very competitive one. The more value you can offer your customers, the more likely they are to book through you – and come back to you for their next holiday. You could offer a one-stop-shop for all of their travel needs including car hire, insurance, airport transfers and attraction tickets. To go one step further, you could think about offering a travel itinerary app for your customers so they have all of their essential travel information with them at all times (without carrying reams of paper).

All of these points will increase your online presence, get you noticed and hopefully increase your online bookings! If you need any help or further advice, we specialise in web solutions for the travel and tourism industry and we’d love to hear from you - get in touch!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Elaine Parker .