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The Best Ways to Recover Abandoned Bookings

The Best Ways to Recover Abandoned Bookings

Brian Fitzgerald
Brian Fitzgerald May 2, 2016
The Best Ways to Recover Abandoned Bookings

When a potential guest abandons a booking on your website for any reason, they are still likely to book a hotel room, either at your property or at another. Perhaps they want to compare your resort with others, check travel review sites, or hunt for cheaper options, and will return to your site later on. However, hoteliers can’t sit around waiting for guests to return and complete their bookings on their own. Using reservation recovery strategies, hoteliers have the ability to retarget guests who have abandoned the booking process, bringing them back to the hotel’s site.

Part of the booking process involves capturing certain information about a guest, most importantly, their email address. Well-designed booking engines ask guests to provide their email addresses early in the booking process. If a booking is abandoned, reservation recovery emails can be easily sent to a guest, inviting them to return and complete their booking. These emails might provide guests with discounts or they can alert guests that their selected room is still available.

When a potential guest visits your site and begins the booking process, they leave behind a trail of digital information. Using this info, hoteliers can target guests who visited the site and abandoned a booking. A retargeting campaign can appear on social media platforms like Facebook, search engines like Google, and other webpages guests visit. You’ve likely even seen one of these ads recently! Have you ever browsed a website and later on, seen an ad to the right of your Facebook page from the website you were looking at earlier? That is retargeting. It’s effective because guests are already familiar with your site and your brand. The remarketing campaign brings them back to their booking, enticing them to finish the process.

Your landing page is a guest’s first impression of your property. If your website is unappealing and difficult to use, especially on a mobile device, guests will abandon their booking in search of a property with a simple, easy-to-use website. Part of reservation recovery is ensuring that your site is responsive and mobile-friendly. A well-designed site will help to mitigate abandoned bookings.

Reservation recovery is an important tool to capture bookings that otherwise would have been totally abandoned. When a potential guest leaves your site, don’t just hope they come back on their own, make them want to come back through email reminders, retargeting, and by providing a superior user experience.

 

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