The Best Hotel Platforms For 2020
We live in a digital age, and nearly everything your customers do involves at least some research online. In addition, most bookings are made online. Check out these statistics:
- An estimated 700 million people will book online by 2023.
- More than 80% of US adults want to book their trips online.
- Nearly 75% of mobile bookings happen within 48 hours of last-minute Google searches.
- More than 80% of all travel bookings around the world took place without human interaction in 2018.
Taking those statistics in hand, you can see how important your booking sites are. Let’s look at the best hotel platforms for 2020.
HotelsCombined.com
While not a direct booking platform, Hotels Combined is a metasearch engine that aggregates data from sites like booking.com, hotels.com, expedia.com, travelocity.com, and agoda.com. It also brings in pricing info from larger hotel chains.
This helps your future customers choose destinations, dates, or even hotels and find the best prices from multiple sources.
Noteworthy is that customers can also see reviews scores, city information, maps, and photographs. An added bonus is they do offer a best price guarantee.
Booking.com
One of the most well known booking sites, booking.com is a favorite of many travelers. With millions of listings, you can bet millions of people trust this easy-to-use platform.
Generally speaking, people in the travel industry feel like booking.com offers the most options for travelers including hotels, bed and breakfasts, guesthouses, hostels, and more.
People flock to booking.com for the great prices to be found there. For worldwide travelers booking last minute travel or even booking in advance, booking.com is full of discounted rates.
This site is extremely helpful in that it lists the reviews on properties right at the top right hand corner of each listing. Your potential customers count on these reviews before booking a property.
The other bonus is that the cancellation information is listed for each property right on the search results page. This is another helpful tool for the customer looking for easy cancellations.
User searches present multiple results options for website visitors, and people have countless search options, making it easier for them to find the property they’re looking for.
Hotels.com
This is another superb booking site, and it provides a wide selection of search options like booking.com.
The site also offers cancellation polices and reviews right on the search results pages which is helpful to your potential customers.
Their search function is helpful as it allows users to choose neighborhoods, landmarks, accommodation type, amenities, themes, and more.
The other piece of information that is nice on hotels.com is their listings of nearby attractions right on the listing search pages. Click through, and there’s even more information on what to do during a person’s stay.
Tripadvisor.com
Another great site, TripAdvisor excels at providing an excess of information for travelers. For example, when users enter a city, not only do they get hotel information, but they see where to go, where to play, where to eat, and a brief synopsis about the area.
Users can search for locations and refine searches by best value, price, lodging type, reviews, amenities, and more. Users can see photos and a long list of traveler reviews.
Travelers can set the search results to pin down other options as well, making this a wealth of information for people.
This site is another aggregator of data, providing different booking sites for travelers to visit and book a room.
Hotwire.com
Hotwire is a booking site that’s similar to others in that you enter your chosen destination, dates, and number of lodgers/rooms needed. Yet, after you do that, it looks quite different from other booking sites.
This is because Hotwire doesn’t actually tell you the name of the hotel until you book it. If you are looking at Hot Rate Hotel listings, they do show you a list of three hotels that you might get. At least this way you can learn a little bit about which property you might end up with.
What you do get is a look at the hotel’s reviews, the price per night, and information about the general location.
Kayak
Another hotel platform is Kayak. They offer a quite simple interface for people looking for lodging.
Kayak is a travel search engine that searches hundreds of other travel sites to find customers as many options as possible. It might find results from online travel agencies, discount suppliers, other search engines, and a hotel’s own website.
It brings all of these results into one place so customers can make an informed decision.
Customers don’t book directly through Kayak. They are simply there to provide customers with all their options, including the best deals.
Agoda
Another booking site that used to focus solely on Asia, it now features properties worldwide.
Their hotel search engine works much like the ones we discussed earlier, and sometimes users may even find better deals on this site. Bottom line – this website often has great insider deals and an effective search function, but users still want to do their research.
Final Thoughts
There is no shortage of hotel platforms or booking sites. We’ve looked at a few of the best hotel platforms of 2020. So, which one should you be on to get the most bookings?
The answer is as many hotel platforms as you’d like. The more eyes you get online, the more likely you are to book your rooms.
Do check out the booking sites’ fees section. You’ll find many that are affordable because they don’t charge you until someone makes a reservation.
These resources can all help you be seen by potential lodgers, and in our digital age, that is key.
Finally, many of your customers will check multiple booking sites as well as your own hotel’s website, so you want to ensure you have a strong online presence. Don’t forget to include reservation options on your own hotel website as well as often customers will book directly with you. (tweet this)
Your website might even be the first and last place your customers check, so be sure it is optimized, mobile-friendly, and filled with the information your customers are looking for.
We are your hotel’s digital advertising specialists. Whether it’s a new website, search engine marketing, social media marketing or website design, we are here to help. Contact us today to start a conversation about your hotel’s digital advertising needs.
Images: Teo Leguay and Bhumil Chheda on Unsplash
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