In our industry, we all work hard to give the guest a pleasant experience. However, the guest experience doesn’t start at check-in, it starts as soon as a user first interacts with our hotel, which often is via the hotel website. Here are six frustrations users experience while attempting to book a hotel room, or shortly thereafter.
1. The Booking Phase
Travellers’ booking phase is crucial for hotels’ ability to take reservations. Unfortunately, many people encounter numerous difficulties when making hotel reservations. Due to the lengthy download time on a device, many users never even access the hotel’s website. This leads to users leaving the website page as their impatience wins out. According to statistics, website users will leave if the screen does not load in 2.5 seconds. The amount of users leaving your internet page can be decreased by optimising the overall number of on-page assets on the website, such as by removing unneeded complicated visuals, embedded media files, and unnecessary photographs.
2. Cookie consent pop-ups
Hoteliers can better understand specific patterns of user behaviour with the use of data gathering and analysis. Understanding user behaviour – be it through third-party cookies or from 2024 through different methods – is simple with data analytics. Cookies are currently one of the main instruments used to store users’ personal information and follow their online behaviour. However, in line with current GDPR regulations, websites need to get user consent before collecting this type of information. Usually, a modal window appear on some websites asking visitors to approve the use of cookies before granting access to the page they are trying to access. While users have become used to cookie consent pop-ups, some implementations can cause an irritating user experience and result in users leaving the website. This is even more relevant when browsing on a smartphone. The safest option is a non-intrusive pop-up explaining how cookies are used and giving users the choice of allowing ‘only required cookies’ or ‘all cookies’.
3. Tiny buttons
Users wanting to book on your websites are known to find tiny buttons to be unpleasant. Guests may accidentally tap the incorrect target that is placed too close to the desired one if they are too small and are not clearly visible to them. This may be a 30-second advertisement or the incorrect page, both of which would irritate users and ultimately cause them to leave the website. Small targets also take longer to reach, so making buttons an accessible size is always necessary to prevent this from happening because, as we all know, users these days are impatient and typically only spend 2-3 minutes on a hotel website.
4. Unsupported back button
A very significant piece of integrated technology is the back button on a hotel website. Booking a hotel on a website can be very difficult for users, despite the fact that it is very straightforward and something that every website should provide. Unfortunately, consumers have expressed their unhappiness with not being able to modify a part of their reservation without losing all of the other details after reaching the checkout page. Statistics have shown that when this issue arises, users would abandon the page in frustration, costing the hotel income. Which demonstrates the significance of custom software in the hotel sector, since it can mean the difference between attracting and losing guests.
5. Autoplay video with sound
You’ve probably had the miserable experience of browsing a website when all of a sudden, an unpleasant voice or strange music starts playing on your speakers. Where is this coming from? You scroll up and down the webpage before realising an unauthorised video is playing. And the sound that is bothering your ears is coming from a video ad that you never clicked to watch. The annoyance comes from users not expecting to hear audio content without their consent and data suggests that when audio is playing users immediately leave the site. Autoplay videos are fine, but ensuring the video default is muted is key to minimise the risk of a user clicking off the site.
6. Pre-arrival communication
Many guests experience “absolute silence” after making a reservation on a hotel website. Typically, pre-arrival communication does not include forthcoming trip reminders, helpful information regarding the guest’s stay, weather updates, interesting local and on-property events, or even possibilities for upgrades and upsells. There don’t seem to be any warnings regarding bad weather, road work and airport delays, before or on the day of arrival. Complete silence! Every hotel should have a CRM technology platform, and therefore this should be a simple problem for hotels to solve. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case and the problem is driving guests away from these uninformative hotel bookings.