The Early May bank holiday is coming soon, maybe you were thinking of going on holiday? Here are some interesting facts about the booking process, from an Irish and a global perspective.
A Failte Ireland study[1] showed that generally more than 70% of people book their holidays online. In addition, a majority prefer not to pre book any activity before they travel. This means it is important that your potential customers can easily book activities online while away from home.
From a global perspective, a Google study showed that 46% of travellers who do mobile travel research say they made their final booking decision on mobile, but moved to another device to make the booking[2]. This means online booking is a real concern for those who sell tours & activities, accommodation or even classes & courses. In this way, your booking system has to be mobile-friendly and needs to be integrated in all your online channels so that your customers can easily book your services from every device or online platform. Google made an overview of the travel process with this graph below. It highlights that the internet is involved in every step of people’s travel preparation.
We did a marketing research on the booking engines that exist in order to help you to find the right solution for your business. The key-findings that stood out from this study were the following 5 features:
- Cross Channel: The booking software you choose has to be cross channel-friendly so that you can integrate the booking form on all your channels (website, Facebook).
- Branded solution: The booking engine needs to integrate your company’s image such as logo and brand colours in order that your brand is recognisable. Indeed, if the name of your company is not clearly mentioned, customers won’t remember it when looking for an activity.
- Universal: Tourism is going global and people who want to book tours and activities may come from many countries, which means they may require different languages and use different currencies. Your booking engine needs to support them.
- Support: Bookings can sometimes become difficult and customers don’t want to spend loads of time trying to contact someone by phone. In this way, the booking engine has to provide an easy support, ideally with live chat and 24/7. The support also applies to suppliers if something’s wrong with the supplier platform for example.
- Sales report: At the end of the booking process, it is important that the booking engine provides a tool to gather and analyse information about all the bookings that were made (or not).
You will be able to learn more about this research and the companies which provide this type of service by looking at our slideshow right there.
Have a great Early May Bank Holiday.
[1] January 2015, 3487 respondants from UK, France, Germany and USA
[2] Google/Ipsos MediaCT, The 2015 Travelers Road to Decision, Aug. 2015
