The hotelier’s guide to stopping hotel booking abandonment

This compares to 69.6%, the average for all sectors, as found by the Baymard Institute in a review of 41 studies from 2006 to 2018.

There are reasons for this, of course. Industries with longer phases of research and planning, along with complex checkout processes, see a higher dropout.

But contrast this with a 1970s secretary booking the boss a short stay at a business hotel in an unknown city. Having identified a likely contender in the yellow pages, the conversation would likely establish availability and whether the price was within the acceptable range, and assuming both answers were acceptable, lead to an immediate reservation.

OK, the hotel might not have the marketing reach and therefore volume of bookings of its 2020s equivalent, but at least most transactional calls end in completion.

It’s this shift from over-the-phone, in-person or high street travel agency searches to a predominantly digital bookings landscape that’s the root-cause of such high levels of booking abandonment, a phenomenon that hoteliers must be aware of and find ways to minimize.

Your digital landscape also holds the key to your growth and success.

What is booking abandonment?

Well, there’s not much more to a simple explanation of the concept than what we describe above: booking abandonment is when hotel website visitors start the process of booking online but leave having failed to complete the transaction.

The place to identify it is the backend of your systems. So what does it look like there?

Assuming your website and booking engine are properly integrated, the telltale signs are the discrepancies illuminated in your analytics data. If actual checkout numbers are lower than the total pageviews of (and submitted data associated with) each of the pages you consider indicate some intent to book, you have evidence of abandonment.

Of course, all hotels will have some abandonment. But the higher the discrepancy, the bigger the problem. And the more granular your data and analytics, the clearer the picture you’ll have as to the size and, crucially, the nature of the problem, enabling you to determine which elements of your booking process should be improved.

Are people falling at the first hurdle, the last or somewhere inbetween?

In increasing order of seriousness and certainty, here are some typical indicators that you’re experiencing abandonment include:

• Generally high traffic to your hotel website but low online booking numbers

• As discussed above, high traffic to pages on your site that indicate intent that differ significantly from numbers of direct bookings

• Any relevant data that you can glean from OTAs (Expedia, Booking.com etc) that your property is listed on

• Information submitted through a webform on your site that doesn’t ultimately lead to an online booking – but you can use this and some of the other data referenced in this list

Don’t panic; booking abandonment is common, as are its high levels in the hotel industry, particularly at independent hotels that don’t have the sophisticated systems of their larger rivals. But with the right strategy, you can rise above the industry average.

So we can see when booking abandonment is happening and how to measure it. But why is it happening? Common reasons include:

• Travelers being in the early stages of planning and not very serious about their intentions

• Their having to confirm their plans with other travelers before finalizing their booking

• Guests shopping around for better deals and finding something cheaper or more attractive elsewhere

• Their being put off or confused by the complexity of your booking process

• Fears about the security of their credit card transaction or other payment options

You can’t address all of these problems but you can most of them, and with those that you can’t, there are ways you could secure future bookings from these people with the right marketing, systems and processes.

Let’s investigate.

5 Tips to minimize your booking abandonment rate

Minimizing booking abandonment is all about demonstrating value and making the process as easy and secure as possible. We’ll break that down into five tips that turn those principles into practical advice.

1. Set fair pricing and be transparent

How often have you had several browser tabs open while researching something online before eventually completing your transaction on one and closing the others?

Many times is the likely answer, and the chances are that what has tipped the balance on many occasions is a fair and transparent price.

So make sure that that’s what you offer on your booking channels. Make it clear what your price includes – such as taxes and any additional fees – and what it doesn’t, and get the edge on your competitors by monitoring their prices using a rate-shopper. But beware the common pricing mistakes that beset poor revenue management practice.

Pricing concerns, though, are a very common reason for booking abandonment, with financially-savvy travelers starting to book at one price while keeping a lookout for a lower price elsewhere, which rebook if they find it – don’t let that happen to you!

2. Optimize your website for mobile devices

The prevalence of mobile device usage for everything, including booking travel accommodations, can not be overstated.

According to 2023 Euromonitor research, mobile now accounts for 35% of all online travel bookings. Reported by PhocusWire, the trend “continues to edge north”.

But we also know that mobile abandonment is much higher than other devices. This is partly to do with frame of mind; internet users are generally more serious when using desktop or laptop computers. But it’s also a function of poor mobile experience, which deters guests from booking.

These two facts – the surge in mobile usage in general but booking abandonment in particular – represent a huge missed opportunity.

Prioritize these simple remedial steps to offer a smoother booking experience on mobile devices:

• Visiting the site on your own mobile device to see what the customer experience is like

• Minimizing pop-ups

• Adjusting image size to reduce load times

• Checking that the view is optimized in both orientations – portrait and landscape

• Checking that your forms are easy to use

Clearly, though, you mustn’t neglect your desktop booking set-up; if you’re too focused on mobile, you could run into the same problems for desktop users, so ensure that you’re covering your optimization bases on all devices.

3. Make it easy to set a reservation with your hotel

It’s a fundamental rule of marketing and e-commerce that the more steps you include in a transaction, the more likely it is that you’ll see booking abandonment.

Internet users are busy. Their time is precious. And they can be impatient when faced with tedium. Yet still unnecessary, confusing or illogical barriers are erected on websites.

A 2024 study on general shopping cart abandonment by the aforementioned Baymard Institute found that 22% of the 1,012 respondents they surveyed cited a “too long / complicated checkout process” as a key reason for ducking out before completing their transaction.

Given the sums involved in hotels and the information required of guests, the figure for the hospitality industry is likely to be higher.

So what can you do?

It might be easier said than done but it’s nonetheless essential to review your existing set-up for:

• How essential each piece of information you’re asking for is

• Whether some form fields can be brought on to the same page to minimize new page loads

• Whether everything is presented in the most logical order

• Whether users can easily navigate ‘back’ without having to start over

• Whether users know when they’ve actually completed the transaction – do they get a confirmation email, for example, and are they redirected to a confirmation page?

And if your assessment is favorable, happy days. But if they’re not, you’ll need to address the problems.

This might be expensive but not doing so could be a false economy when you consider the amount of frustration and lost business associated with suboptimal user experiences.

4. Consider adding a live chat to your site

Have you considered incorporating live chat into your booking platform?

Of course, it’s not for everyone, and some people find it offputting, so if you install it, don’t program it to pop up immediately if at all unbidden.

But it is for some users, particularly millennials, for example, 61% of whom favor this technology. In another survey, “60% of customers say they are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat, and over 63% are more likely to purchase from websites with live chat widgets”, and AI is of course massively improving the chatbot experience.

So a prominent but not too obtrusive chatbot widget could be just the ticket for those who appreciate a bit of hand-holding or want to ask questions before handing over their money, whether that’s on cancellation policy, deposit refunds or transits to and from the airport.

Adding this functionality to your site could be much quicker than you think. The main steps amount to:

• Finding a chat provider

• Installing the widget

• Completing the set-up, something that differs depending on the provider

• Testing it for ease of use and accuracy and, if appropriate, refining it

5. Use remarketing to capture lost bookings

The first four tips deal with minimizing your booking abandonment rate. But what if you’ve lost the booking. Is that the end of the road?

No! This is particularly true if you’ve lost the business not because you didn’t provide a good booking experience but for circumstances beyond the user’s control.

There are steps you can take to win future bookings from anyone who’s been on your site and left any sort of digital footprint, either one that results in their details being known to your systems because they’ve filled in some of their personal details or at least their device, or one in which at least their device is known through the use of cookies.

These steps focus on omnichannel remarketing, which you can deploy in an effort to recapture – and restimulate – traveler interest.

This is the subject of a blog post in its own right but, for starters, consider this nonexhaustive list of digital marketing tactics, some of which can use marketing automation:

• Setting up real-time automation-based abandonment emails with personal subject lines

• Sending follow-up emails further down the line with future offers

• Creating other messages with conditional, automation-based content based on the data you’ve captured

• Multi-channel messaging, such as SMS messages, also depending on what you’ve gathered about your users and any usage restrictions

• Retargeting campaigns and ads on other websites, all of which redirect to your channels

• Placing other paid ads

• Upping your social media campaign activity

• Sending out print mailers, perhaps with special offers, if you got as far as obtaining users’ postal addresses – that personal touch could tip the balance next time

Leverage data to tackle hotel booking abandonment

We’ve talked a lot about marketing. But you can’t plan campaigns in isolation. They must be informed by the general state of your revenue management strategy, targets and results.

How are you performing with metrics such as pickup and pace and other data-points in your salecycle? Where are you compared to this time last year? What curves are your RevPAR, ADR and average order value on? How do you compare to your competitors’ prices?

Only by answering these questions can you plan coordinated activity with focus and depth of strategy.

A vital link in that chain of understanding is software that can help you understand your own performance data.

Lighthouse Business Intelligence leverages your PMS data into a user-friendly, dynamic dashboard to deliver insights into all of your commercial team business metrics. With almost instant clarity into your business performance you are empowered to make proactive data-driven decisions

Metrics on your abandoned bookings will never be zero. That’s just not how today’s internet users operate. But there’s no reason you can’t see a significant reduction and a better conversion rate with joined-up, data-driven marketing and revenue management strategies.