3 Focus Areas for Hotel Marketers

As a hotel marketer, you should always include the following areas in your hotel marketing strategies:

• The four stages of hotel user search behavior
• The different devices where users can retrieve hotel information
• The three cases of hotel user behavior on a hotel booking engine

Understand the Four Stages of Hotel User Search Behavior

As revealed previously, users are able to reach your hotel booking engine website through four different channel types: search engines, comparison websites, hotel booking engines, and brand/chains.

For search engines, are you well covered with good marketing strategies on your search engine optimization and paid search marketing?

For comparison websites, are you listed on the top hotel price comparison websites and/or hotel review websites?

For hotel booking engines, is your hotel booking engine website well designed for users to search for specific hotels with specific requirements? Is your hotel booking engine website well designed for users to make a hotel booking right away?

Understand the Different Devices Where Users Can Retrieve Hotel Information

Users search for hotels with different device types. Within device types, there are many different types of models as well. The different screen sizes of devices make hotel marketing on the Internet highly fragmented. Some examples below:

• Consumers are using mobile devices on the go. They do mobile searches while they are traveling between home and the office, Or when they are at an airport waiting for their flight while on business trips. This type of searches usually tends to be more hotel/travel informational. Mobile devices also tend to have much smaller screen sizes than tablet and desktop devices, which makes booking a hotel a more difficult task on mobile devices.
• Tablet devices are most used in the evening while users are browsing from home. It is less convenient to open a desktop or laptop computer, but easier to pick up a tablet and start using it right away. Using a tablet device to make a hotel booking tends to be easier than it is through a mobile device, due to the larger screen size and generally better user behavior provided by most tablet devices.
• Under normal circumstances, desktop should have a higher hotel booking conversion rate than tablet and mobile devices. A larger screen improves user experience and makes it easier to make a successful hotel booking. Most hotel booking engines still work better on a desktop environment in terms of hotel information searches and hotel bookings.

Have you already adapted a responsive design for your hotel booking engine website? Or have you opted to build different website versions for different device types?

Understand the Three Cases of Hotel User Behavior on a Hotel Booking Engine

As revealed previously with three cases of user behavior on hotel booking websites, your users don’t always land directly on the home page of your travel website.

If a user enters destination search terms and/or hotel name search terms, search engines very likely return search results that will take users to hotel result search pages, hotel detail pages, or different hotel booking engine websites.