Hotels participating in an Expedia ‘traveller preference’ programme are seeing “significant revenue” increases, the online travel giant claims.
Expedia ‘traveller preference’ programme seeing results
Hotels participating in an Expedia ‘traveller preference’ programme are seeing “significant revenue” increases, the online travel giant claims.
Preliminary results from more than 1,400 of the 13,000 signed up to the scheme show increased booking volumes and values.
The programme is designed to better serve travellers by offering them the choice to pay either at the time of booking (called Expedia Collect) or when checking out at the hotel directly (called Hotel Collect).
Early testing shows improvement in two areas:
- More bookings: Participating hotels are receiving more bookings when a traveller is offered a choice of how they would like to pay compared to being given a single option.·
- Bookings with longer length of stays: Offering a choice to travellers of how they would like to pay is improving the value of the bookings with average length of stay increases of around 5%.
Participating hotels are also seeing improved placement in hotel search results giving them greater potential exposure to more than 50 million unique visitors that shop for and book travel on Expedia and subsidiary Hotels.com each month.
Search result placement is driven in part by conversion rates as well as booking volumes.
Participating properties are not only getting a greater share of bookings from travellers exposed to their hotels but they are moving up in search results, providing them with exposure to even more travellers, which in turn leads to even more bookings, Expedia claims.
Senior vice president Melissa Maher said: “Our research showed that travellers prefer to have a choice of whether they pay for their reservation up front or pay at the hotel at the time of stay, which is why we developed the Expedia Traveller Preference programme.
“In addition to better serving our travellers, early test results indicate that the hotels in the programme receive more bookings at greater value, which ultimately leads to more revenue.”
