Since 2011, the use of the mobile phone as an internet connection device has been growing unstoppably thanks to the continuous improvement of terminal services and the popularization of “flat” data rates. In these years the mobile has become the preferred device to access the Internet by 75% of Spaniards.
Even so, in 2017 and with all the data available today on the use of mobile, many sectors and companies do not pay the attention should not be given to it, nor do they make the necessary efforts to optimize communication and sales through this channel.
The results of the last year show that 40% of the hotel sector’s bookings are made through mobile, with sales from the PC leading the number of reservations with 60%. Perhaps it is quite obvious that before these results hotels have the tendency to invest and bet on the PC, but let’s see what happens with the mobile.
The mobile, despite year-over-year is gaining more importance in online sales, is still considered by many as a secondary device from which a customer makes a booking. The arguments for this are that the mobile is an instrument that serves as inspiration / research and that at the time of booking customers are transferred to a PC; that the information is clearer and more relevant from a PC or that the users do not agree to put the data of their cards in a mobile.
A few years ago this was so, but today is close to generating 50% of the bookings of an establishment, although if we want to obtain the same results in PC we have to make equivalent efforts: optimize our site and booking engine for mobile in order to provide the customer the same information, the same possibilities and the same security as in a PC, but with an optimized experience for these terminals.
Nowadays most of the hotels’ websites are responsive, but in many cases when you click on the booking button and launch the booking engine we find usability problems, very small spaces between buttons, that is impossible to read clearly, with images that take too long to load, etc, etc, etc.
We must be aware of how much money makes us lose a booking engine with these characteristics. A booking engine that has not been designed with mobile in mind makes us lose a lot of money. Not only that it makes us lose the bookings that the customers would have finished in the mobile, in the case where the engine was built for it, but it generates a bad experience and a bad opinion of our hotel that causes us to lose bookings in PC as well.
Based on our experience, the tests and implementations of mobile optimized booking engines, we can assure you that the difference in the conversion rate between a booking engine perfectly adapted to mobile and one that is not, is approximately 43% and the difference between the number of bookings is 55 – 60%.
