How to measure Website Direct Hotel Bookings

Let’s be honest. Most independent hotels and hotel chains have a love hate relationship with OTAs. We love the volume of business they bring but hate the commission they take on each booking. To reduce our cost of sale we are continually looking for ways to channel more bookings via our own website. But what’s the best way to measure website direct conversion?

Below are the 3 main tracking method I see being used within the hotel industry.

1. Visitors to Book (VTB) - This tracks the percentage of people that visit the home page of the hotels website and then make a booking on the hotels booking engine.

2. Visitors to Look (VTL) – This tracks the percentage of people that visit the home page of the hotels website and then visit the hotels booking engine.

3. Look to Book (LTB) – This tracks the percentage of people that visit the hotels booking engine and then make a booking.

Sabre Hospitality who supply an online booking engine to 33,000 hotels globally use method 2 & 3 and consider these tracking methods as best practice. Between Jan-Jun 2017 Sabre monitored results from 264 hotel clients using their Retailing Insights software to establish client averages.

Sabre clients VLT average is 30%. Sabre clients LTB average is 5%.

When you compare these stats to your own what do they actually mean? If your VLT is below the Sabre client average it’s an indication that visitors to your website are not finding what they need and so deciding not to proceed to making a booking. Areas to look at for improvement are website design, navigation, content and page load speeds.

If your LTB conversion is lower that the Sabre client average this is an indication that when people arrive at the booking engine something is stopping them from booking. This could be caused by a number of reasons. The most common reason is that the rates viewed by the potential booker may not be competitive against rates they’ve seen on OTAs which is a rate distribution or revenue management issue.

Other reasons include poor booking engine navigation, low quality images and unclear text descriptions of rooms and promotions.

In summary website direct business growth is key to reducing online booking costs and it’s important to make sure you’re using best practice when looking at conversion.