Searching for booking tips and tricks to amp up your travel business? Did you suddenly notice a significant drop in your overall website traffic and bookings?
Many entrepreneurs in the travel industry face such problems at least once in their business journey. That means you aren’t alone in this misfortune.
At some point in your business, you can experience frustration due to losing key clients or not seeing the desired results.
Now, you may be wondering how you can overcome this situation. Well, that’s exactly what you’ll know after you complete reading this article.
In this post, we’ll discuss the top ten strategies to increase bookings on your website and elevate your website traffic.
Ten powerful tips to increase travel website bookings
Here are the top ten powerful booking tips and tricks you can implement in your travel business and witness your business booming like never before.
1. Create a user-friendly travel website
According to Forbes, 88% of web visitors leave websites and never return due to having an inferior user experience. That means you can lose many prospects if your travel website fails to provide an excellent user/customer experience.
Therefore, creating a user-friendly travel website tops everything. While building a website, you can use a booking specific theme like Travelfic to align with your business’s vibe.
Additionally, display stunning images of attractive destinations and accommodations on your website to draw customers’ attention.
You know, web visitors usually spend considerable time browsing and searching for travel options.
Hence, you need to streamline the overall booking process. More specifically, ensure the search and filter options are easy to navigate and intuitive to use.
2. Improve your booking process
Image credit: Freepik
Nobody nowadays wants to wait a prolonged time to book tours/services online, and they do not prefer a travel website with a complicated booking process.
So, streamlining the booking process is essential. To do this, you need to optimize your booking forms. You need to put as few booking form fields as possible so that users can quickly fill-out forms and complete booking.
Furthermore, try using different form layouts and creating multi-step forms to keep customers on track when they make the booking.
You can use Contact Form 7 in conjunction with Ultimate Addons for Contact Form 7 to create attractive booking forms that resonate with your business.
Remember, the clearer and more concise the booking steps are, the higher the conversion rate will be. So, carefully build booking forms and make the booking process easy to give customers a hassle-free booking experience.
3. Focus on mobile users
Do you know how many users book services (or purchase products) online with their smartphones? According to Outerboxdesign, 79% of customers make purchases using their smartphones!
That’s a vast number of potential customers for any business. Therefore, make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Also, implement clear call-to-action strategies throughout your website.
The benefit you will get by making your travel website mobile-friendly is that Google will prioritize your website in the search results.
Hence, you’ll get organic visitors from Google. Thus, you’ll be able to increase bookings on your travel website!
4. Be transparent
Trust is everything! It’s the primary element that helps a company to grow a loyal customer base.
But how do you build trust among customers? You can follow the most straightforward way – be transparent. You need to be open and honest with your customers when it comes to order cancellation policies, data collection policies, payment systems, etc.
Plus, you need to use an SSL certificate to ensure the sensitive data encryption system to secure your customers’ passwords and other private data.
As you know, travelers long for trust, certainty, and clarity. Thus, you can get the reward of increased bookings if you can build customer trust.
That being said, here are a few other strategies to follow to gain customer trust.
- Display service/booking cost with all taxes and fees upfront.
- Create easy refund and cancellation policies.
- Show authentic customer reviews.
- Let customers see how you deal with negative reviews/situations.
- Use an SSL certificate for your booking website’s data encryption system.
By following the abovementioned strategies, you can easily build customer trust and see increased bookings in no time!
5. Personalize user experience
Personalizing user experience is one of the most essential tricks for increasing bookings on your travel website. You know people love to be treated well.
So, using automated email, you can warmly welcome your new visitors by their first name when they subscribe to your newsletter. Or when they make a booking or purchase tour packages or services. You can send them a welcome email or push notifications to make them feel special.
Doing this will help you build a strong bond with potential customers. Alongside this, you can track user behavior and offer them personalized services.
For instance, imagine that some of your customers always book hotels with free Wi-Fi and complimentary lunch. Hence, when they search for hotels on your travel website, you can display a few hotels offering free Wi-Fi and lunch to those customers.
Another example could be sending them special coupons before special days like birthdays or marriage.
The goal here is to offer every customer the information/services/packages they seek.
6. Consider upselling and cross-selling
Upselling and cross-selling can help you increase bookings on your travel website. You need to help customers with added benefits through your service and make them realize that your service can address your customers’ pain points.
For example, you can offer customers flight seats with extra legroom at a little additional cost. Also, you can promote a package tour while they book a single tour package. Another instance could be offering an airport pickup service as an add-on.
These are just a few examples of what you can promote to customers when they book a trip or other services on your website.
Remember, you can lose customers even after utilizing the method of upselling and cross-selling. It may occur when you do it incorrectly and unwisely.
So, how can you correctly and smartly present your extra services to customers? Well, here are a few tips:
- Only promote offers that can compel customers to book your services.
- Run A/B tests for conversions.
- Don’t offer a product/service when a visitor is at checkout.
- Don’t confuse customers with unnecessary information and offers.
When you follow these upselling and cross-selling tricks, your site’s overall bookings will improve.
7. Display testimonials
Displaying customer reviews with ratings on your website can help you increase bookings. In today’s world, people trust peer recommendations over traditional advertising.
Therefore, you can draw your visitors’ attention and convert them into paying customers by including customer reviews and recommendations on your offer pages. Additionally, employ urgency among customers to make them act fast! How?
Put special deals with discounts or incentives on customers’ recommended tours/services. Make sure those deals remain valid for a limited time. Also, you can display the number of people viewing or booking those special tours/services on the result pages.
You can implement other practical strategies, such as FOMOs (Fear of Missing out). To cite an example, you can offer the last few tickets at a low price or reward customers who book your packages right now or in the next 30 minutes with free hotel upgrades!Â
You can research and brainstorm your own techniques and conduct A/B tests to determine which strategy produces the best results.
8. Leverage diverse marketing channels
Indeed, marketing can help you get many new visitors and potential customers. But how do you marketize your brand to attract new prospects? Should you follow old marketing techniques or apply new and practical ones?
Of course, to skyrocket your travel business, you need to follow new marketing strategies and utilize diverse marketing channels. That said, here are a few marketing strategies and channels you can leverage.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO can immensely help you gain new prospects and increase bookings. Optimizing your website for SEO will increase your website’s search engine visibility. Consequently, it will enhance the chances of turning visitors into paid customers for your hotel booking or travel booking services.
To optimize your website for SEO, you need to create travel-related content utilizing on-page and off-page SEO strategies so that your content informs, entertains, and inspires your targeted audience.
We recommend you follow helpful SEO strategies to boost your travel business.
SMM (Social Media Marketing)
SMM can be incredibly beneficial for your travel business. As you know, people spend many hours on their social media accounts.
So, here, you have a very good chance of catching those people’s eyes with your attractive social media posts. You can share inspiring travel stories on your business page on diverse social media platforms.
You can build a strong community of travelers who regularly share tips and tricks within your community. Besides, you can host travel-related events to keep the community engaged and promote your business.
Email Marketing
Last but not least, you need to reap the benefits of email marketing to see a spike in revenue in your travel business. Email marketing helps a lot when it comes to increasing sales or bookings.
So, use practical email marketing techniques and the best email marketing tools to promote your brand and offers to the targeted people.
These are a few of the many marketing strategies and channels you can follow and use to give your travel business a new height!
9. Provide multiple payment gateway options
Imagine a scenario where you choose a product from an online shop and add it to the cart. But whenever you opt to make the payment, you see your preferred payment option isn’t available.
It’s frustrating, right? Your customers can also experience the same incident if your travel website doesn’t have multiple payment gateway options.
Therefore, integrate all the mainstream payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Alipay, etc..
And never lose a potential customer due to payment issues.
10. Catch attention to exit intent!
Last but not least, you need to draw customers’ attention when they’re about to leave your website.
You can set up a pop-up message displaying hot deals, offers, tour packages, and other services on your travel website.
Set the pop-up message in a way that it activates when someone tries to leave your website. It’ll indeed catch visitors’ attention and may help you convert some visitors into paying customers.
In the end
Like every other business, the travel business sometimes faces a downfall and struggles to get many customers.
However, your travel business can shine even during the off-season (the challenging time for travel businesses) if you implement all the strategies outlined in this booking tips and tricks article.
These are proven strategies that can help you increase bookings during tough times and reach your revenue goals quickly!
So, prioritize each strategy and carefully apply them all. Our best wishes will be with you. Should you have questions about any strategy, don’t hesitate to drop us a line below.
Finally, if you liked this article, don’t forget to share it with your friends so everyone benefits.
