direct bookings
Hotel direct bookings: turning a boutique group's website into a booking engine
Commission on almost every stay pushed this boutique group to chase hotel direct bookings, since online travel agents took most reservations. A faster booking flow, clear best-rate messaging and checkout testing lifted direct bookings by 48% and cut booking abandonment by 23%.
Illustrative example. Client details are anonymised and representative of the work we do.
- Industry
- Hospitality
- Services
- Website Redesign Services + more
- Platforms
- WordPress, Google Analytics 4
- Duration
- 4 months
Where they started
Most bookings came through online travel agents, costing the group heavy commissions on every stay.
The approachWhat we changed
We redesigned the site around a faster booking flow, added clear best-rate messaging and tested the checkout until abandonment fell.
What other businesses can take from this
Many independent hotels depend on travel agent sites because those sites are quick, trusted and easy to book. Guests often find the hotel there, check its own website, and then go back to book where it feels simpler. Slow pages, a clumsy booking engine and no reason to believe the rate is better all push them back to the agent.
Other hotels can learn from where the effort went: speed first, with average page load now 1.4 seconds, then a clear reason to book direct, then testing the checkout step by step until abandonment fell. None of this needs a bigger marketing budget, since the guests are already on the website.
This suits hotel groups with steady demand that pay more in commission than they would like.
What moved
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