Nowdays, people are more time poor than ever, and a slow booking experience will quickly put them off.

From an outsiders perspective, try using your website.  Or better yet, have a friend or family member test your site for you that isn’t overly familiar with the site.  How quickly and easily were they able to find your booking engine to make a booking?  If the answer was anything other than “instantly” with one-click, you may be losing potential guests before you’ve even started!

Here are our top tips on best practice with your booking engine:

Make it easy to find

Think about how easy it is to find your booking engine on your website.  Do you have a Book Now menu item, or button, easily found on your homepage?  Or to book, does a guest have to go through numerous menus and pages to eventually find themselves at your booking engine.

Best practice tips:

• Have a Book Now menu or place a prominent Book Now button (image) on your site
• Embed a search widget on your homepage (embedded widget only)
• Ensure the Book Now button or search widget is above the fold (area visible without further scrolling)
• If a guest clicks your Book Now link – take them straight to the booking engine

Breakers North feature a prominent Book Now button in their menu bar:

Q1 Resort & Spa had their web developer embed a search gadget to their homepage.  This option would only work for those properties using an embedded booking widget on their site:

Make it yours with customisations

It doesn’t matter if you are using the standalone booking engine or the embedded booking widget, you should customise it for your brand.

Tips for customising the standalone booking engine:

• Add your logo – if you have a png version with a transparent background, even better!
• Change the background colour to match your brand
• Customise the defaults – auto ticked number of nights, guest numbers, change label names in the grid and more!
• Ensure all your property details and room descriptions are up to date within your ResOnline console, as these appear underneath the booking engine

An example of a customised standalone booking engine is Alure Stanthorpe;

Make changes to your booking engine from within the Booking Button menu in your ResOnline console.

If you have the booking widget embedded, please speak with your web developer about customisations.