Can the Order that your Rooms appear Increase the Number of Reservations?
In Bookwize we always aim to make our booking engine’s flow a precious advantage for our clients in order to achieve the highest conversion possible and increase their hotels’ direct reservations. Therefore, we constantly record the users’ behavior and analyze every aspect of our Booking Engine’s flow.
The latest experiment that we have performed – and would like to share with you – was regarding the direct reservations of two beach resorts in Crete, Greece. We wanted to explore whether sticking in the room types’ order, no matter the availability, would have a positive or negative impact on the conversion rate of the hotels’ website. By default, the room type sorting in search results shows the available rooms first and then the unavailable ones. What would have happened if we kept the price order instead of the availability order?
In order to find out, we created an A/B Test presenting the Original order (based on availability) to the half of the websites’ visitors and a Variation of the order (based on pricing) to the rest half of the visitors. The test was performed to 30,440 website visitors.
The outcome was impressive! The Variation order had an increase of 104% in comparison to the performance of the Original order with a confidence level of 94%. The Price Sorting increased the value perception for the guests and achieved double number of reservations in comparison to the Availability Sorting.
In Bookwize we consistently test the conversion results of our hotels and suggest to our clients various amendments which will improve their figures, according to our experiments. Of course, every hotel is a single case and we deal with each one separately. In the specific Case Study and under these circumstances (occupancy percentage, rates, room types) the amendment had impressive results. For any other hotel and other circumstances, the results may vary.