How to build a hotel booking website

Hotel business is a constantly changing industry, making hoteliers think beyond the traditional way of doing business and facilitate digital transformation with new technologies advent. Implementing innovative software solutions can help to speed up business processes, improve productivity and make a profit based on a created online hotel booking business model. There are some critical reasons to build a hotel booking website successfully are presented below:

• Take reservations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Bookings and payments can be made at any time of day or night. It leads to keeping your business up and running 24/7.
• All user data is a structured system. The walk-in, email and phone bookings data being best-valued resources in a business are kept in a structured and logical order.
• Upselling. It allows to sell extra products, services to produce extra revenue.
• Less workload. The reservations process via a booking software is less time-consuming. It helps to handle all aspects of the bookings more simple.
• ?ommission-free. Cutting the middlemen or 3rd party in order not to pay a portion of monthly income.

Discover the main principles while designing the hotel booking website to drive up occupancy

1. Relevance and Content

The target audience should be defined, as different clients are interested and attracted to different information. Relevant info should be created before setting up the navigation, then the information should be categorised.

2. Menu and Navigation

Categorising is a good idea to organise your content and make it intuitive and logical in order any user is able to navigate fast without being overloaded with extra options. The following categories Hotels, Cars, Flights, Vacations, Favourites, Support, Language, Register, Sign in should be considered to make a hotel booking website. You can also use a category label like “More” to offer a dropdown menu with subcategories like FAQ, etc.

3. Design

The hotel website for reservations should be very critical to impress, engage, entice the target audiences to reserve directly with you. Consider the following while designing the website:

• Content should not be overpowered with flashy designs, animation.
• Necessary information should be found quickly based on consistent navigation.
• Clear font usage to keep customers reading without distracting.

4. Layout

When thinking about the layout of your hotel booking website design an acronym CRAP should be kept in mind:

• Contrast. Text should be seen easily against the background, accent colour should be added to attract visual interest and catch users’ attention.
• Repetition. The navigation menu should be repeated on every page in order user's journey within a site is simple, quick. Important information (such as copyright, contact information) should be repeated on every page footer, hyperlinks to other pages should be also provided for SEO purposes.
• Alignment. Images and text can be aligned in a type of grid to look better, to help in presenting information in a well-structured way.
• Proximity. Keeping related information together should be considered when organising the content into categories for your navigation.

5. Use of high-quality Images

Visual appeal is a way to get an overall and clear idea of what to expect. Eliciting images allow to emphasise the main tour features for showing their best sights.

The most crucial features you need while development to create a booking website effectively

Booking engine being a key part of your website provides a flawless user-experience to a potential client, allows to reserve services for upcoming vacation easily, provides a flawless user-experience to a potential customer, allows to reserve services for upcoming vacation easily, helps to drive bookings online, so any hotel website is incomplete without it.

Key benefits to look for in a hotel booking engine for website

#1. Predictive search with filters and widgets

The process of finding an ideal destination is easier by applying the predictive search with a drop-down list of destinations or hotels that are changing as the user adds more characters to the search input. Presenting the results based on your choice after specifying your budget, facilities you expect, stars number, a lodging type (such as villa, hotel, resorts) filters and widgets help. Viewing the available results and picking up the listing that interests you the most.

#2. Calendar is Available

A visual calendar allows to display reservations in a particular period of time. It is an easy way for managers to plan additional destinations and refreshments, to verify if the booking is possible and available on the desired dates for the visitors.

#3. Quick and easy checkouts

Offering a short form for your guests to be filled out when they are ready to reserve. Completing reservation, or payment process without being redirected. Creating bright, simple, easy-to-use “Book Now” button allowing to facilitate specials and packages faster.

#4. Mobile app feature

Bookings within mobile are growing steadily, so a hotel booking application is preferred to be embedded into websites in order users can download and install it, get access to booking engine features within their device.

#5. Currency and Language Settings

Content should be displayed in different languages to provide more information about services, offers, currencies should be accommodated to make the payment more simple.

#6. Ability to connect with social networking sites

Booking engine for hotels should be integrated with popular social networking sites such as Facebook, etc. It allows users to book with you in a convenient for them way.

#7. Secure online payment process

Chances to get confirmed reservations increase with implemented payment gateway. It enhances validity, demonstrates client privacy and security, allows to get guaranteed instant payments.

#8. Search through maps

It is helpful to see available holidays laid out on a map, especially one that is fully interactive and lets you see the destination details selected with an image you are more interested in.

#9. Cancellation service, clear refund terms

Cancellation feature works favourably for most hotel websites. Users appreciate it when they are permitted to book with the assurance that they can cancel it. However, the cancellation time period can be always specified.

#10. Favourites list

If you haven’t settled on a destination yet, a favourites list is a very helpful tool which allows you to remember the places that briefly took your fancy earlier while searching.

Drawing a line

The online booking system aim is to be reserved with ease, to be managed in a simple way. It is very crucial to survive in the hotel business growth by implementing organised, comprehensive, functional online system for bookings that lets users from all over the globe to reserve services, to assure that highlighted above features for better interaction for both you and your tourists are considered.

DDI Development company has a team of highly skilled and experienced experts who help to build software solutions, robust applications for any business need. Our developers collaborate to understand the business requirements for creating software products, applications to implement digital solution to boost business and get more profit.