Smartphones have become an increasingly popular tool to search for the best hotels and rates when booking travel arrangements. Whether it’s for a business trip or a vacation, or whether you’re flying across the country or taking a road trip one state away, our smartphones are becoming the first thing we turn to when researching hotels.
A study by Statista has shown that nearly 70% of travelers use a mobile device before leaving home for a trip – proving that travelers are researching and booking hotel accommodations on their mobile devices. Here are a few reasons why you should also be analyzing the calls driven from your mobile marketing campaigns:
Mobile Search Drives Traffic to Your Website and Calls from SERPs
As mobile becomes more prevalent in one’s day-to-day activity, it’s important to realize how many searches are done on hotel and travel sites. Last year alone, >40% of Americans booked travel reservations from a mobile device. People want a quick and easy way to compare hotel prices, amenities, and reviews, and a mobile search is key for travelers on the go.
A guest might search for multiple hotels before deciding on one to stay at, which could then result in a call to your hotel. But where does that call come from? A Google call extension? Your hotel’s mobile website? When optimizing your search campaigns, it’s important to be able to track every outlet (including calls) that guests have to find your hotel, as well as being able to communicate efficiently in order to connect that guest to your hotel staff.
Forms vs. Calls: Travelers Want to Talk
With all the statistics around mobile bookings, one might question whether their phone is actually going to ring. But think about some reasons why a traveler would need to call a hotel: booking multiple rooms for their company’s annual business trip, getting a block of hotel rooms for wedding guests, or they’re traveling overseas. Having a conversation over the phone is easier than waiting for a response from a form submission or trying to communicate via email.
For those who don’t want to fill out a tiny form on their smartphone, they can simply use a click-to-call button to speak to a live person at a hotel. By attributing offline call data to the same online search, you’ll gain more insights into how your marketing is affecting overall bookings. You will then be able to optimize your paid search budgets and see an increase in ROI from these campaigns. For example, DialogTech has helped HotelsCorp optimize their paid search to increase phone leads by 83% and drive 71% more bookings.
Personalize Call Experience and Understand Guest Satisfaction
Call analytics help equip your hotel staff with the best information available when a potential guest calls to book a room. For example, your hotel staff will see a screen-pop as soon as the call comes in with the keyword-level information the guest used to search for your hotel, such as “hotels with conference rooms”. The staff will then know that the guest is interested in hotels with conference rooms and will be able to provide a seamless transition from the guest’s online search to the offline conversation.
Another way to increase guest satisfaction is to record and analyze the calls placed to your hotel to get deeper insight into your staff’s actual conversations with callers. You can filter to only analyze calls for booking confirmations to determine what makes a successful call. Or you can filter for calls where there isn’t a confirmation and use that data to improve future situations.
For more information on the ways DialogTech can increase ROI on your hospitality business’s marketing campaigns, check out our webinar on Paid Search and Mobile Click-to-Call: New Strategies to Drive Calls and Sales.