Why and How to Optimize Your Travel Website for a Busy Summer Season?

Brace yourselves people, summer is coming, bringing in the new wave of tourists looking for the ideal summer destination. For several seasons now, more than 50% of people opt for booking a summer vacation using online tools like travel websites, making online travel bookings one of the most competitive markets in the digital world today.

Numbers never lie

Over the course of the last five years, internet travel booking revenue has grown by more than 73% and almost 150 million travel bookings are made on the internet annually. Many are those who emphasize the simplicity at which you can research and book travel place on the internet.

When it comes to travel reservations in general, almost 60% are made on the internet, including hotel reservations, air ticketing and package tours. The truth is that modern-day, savvy travelers expect specialized mobile services, from hotel check-in functions, in-destination booking services, quick access to reliable customer services and many more.

The most visited are brand websites, where distribution is operated and managed by the brand (64.5%) and merchant websites, such as hotwire.com, orbitz.com, travelocity.com (19.5%). Least amount of bookings are made on retail websites – third party distributors used by hotels to list inventory at the same price they offer to consumers while the distributor is paid a commission (3.7%).

Those running any type of travel website need to have seasonality on their mind all year long. To avoid being surprised or intimidated by the (over)load of summer vacationers, ask yourself the crucial question: is your website ready to satisfy the needs of this multi-screen universe?

Most widely used (sun)screen

More often than not, travelers will utilize several devices to fully plan their trip and according to Google, staggering 90% alternate between their smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops to complete an online task.

A mobile is becoming the predominant method in booking travel arrangements, allowing consumers to plan their vacation on the go. Around 65% last minute hotel reservations are made from a smartphone, and still 76% of online travel booking services are not fully mobile-optimized.

Slow loading time is the key reason why 36% of travel brands claimed to have suffered abandonment, as 2 out of 3 users expect pages to load in less than 4 seconds on their phones. There is a 41% of overall abandonment rate in the travel industry, indicating that mobile optimization is the key in keeping consumers engaged.

How can it be achieved?

1. Design

When it comes to responsive web design, although it is aesthetically pleasing to consumers, page loading speed suffers immensely. With 85% of users expecting from mobile phones the same speed they get from their PCs, it is evident that the focus should be relocated.

What travel brands are advised to do is reduce the payloads of their web pages across the board, lower the number of round trips baked into sites, optimize scripts and images, and consider consolidating their URLs (canonization). Remember, responsive web designs might optimize your website, but not its performance.

2. Data

Travel websites are known to be form-heavy, and the industry is (understandably) asking for as much customer data as possible to perform responsively in its marketing efforts. Nevertheless, we cannot neglect the fact that data trackers increase the weight of the website and are upping the number of data fetching tasks, leaving a great impact on page loading speed.

3. Images

We can all agree that high-quality images are of prime importance for travel websites as they are one of the most crucial factors when opting for a particular travel destination. However, by optimizing images for the web you are able to reduce the size without downgrading the image quality. Opting for this method will reduce the time span in which images are served to the user. Furthermore, the total number of images that can be stored in the browser cache will be increased significantly, what is bound to cause a drastic improvement in web page loading speed on repeated visits to the same page.

Another common issue concerns are those who are known to format images inappropriately, since images saved in a wrong format are likely to end up being considerably larger than when saved to the format of optimal size. Images take up around a quarter of a website and by uploading them in unnecessarily high resolutions, bandwidth, cache space and processing time are wasted.

Independent hoteliers

When it comes to independent hoteliers, there are many who opt for dealing with reservations from multiple channels. Although this practice might have showed good results during quiet time, it is advisable to welcome the peak season with automated and centralized reservation management. This way you avoid struggling with overbooking and data entry errors which surely result in unhappy customers.

To keep the customers happy and reduce the amount of administrative load, automate online management by integrating your online channels with your property management system (PMS). By connecting your PMS and booking channels, you are allowing the PMS to send live rates and availability to your online booking channels. This automatization comes most in handy during the periods of high occupancy.

By 2019, we can expect to see one-quarter of all online travel bookings to occur on mobile devices. More and more people are looking to meet in-the-moment for travel needs, demanding fast experience. Yet, many website builders find it challenging to build a page that will perform well across all devices. If we were to set one universal rule, it would be to keep the webpage small, preferably up to about 1MB in size.

So pack your bags guys, we’re traveling light and expect to be there in less than 4 seconds!