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4 minute 4 Aug, 2022

How To Increase Bookings For Travel, Hospitality, and Recreational Businesses

In the travel and recreation industries, seasonality is something every business owner prepares for. One of the ways to keep income steady is to find ways to keep customers coming in year-round and make loyal return customers out of as many new bookings as possible. At the end of the day, it is all about increasing bookings.

How To Increase Bookings For Travel, Hospitality, and Recreational Businesses

In this guide, we are going to discuss how to increase bookings in the following ways:

  • Create an engaging website.
  • Maintain an active social media presence.
  • Develop a customer loyalty program.
  • Offer flexible payment options.

Let’s dive into each idea and the basic steps to accomplish them and reduce vacancies.

Create an Engaging Website

One of the easiest ways to increase the conversion of web leads is to optimize the website for engagement. This requires creating a quality landing page with clear calls to action and links to important information about your product or service.

While some companies may have the means to hire a web dev team for this, smaller companies may find it useful to use a web service like Squarespace to create a website from pre-designed templates. Services like this have helped companies worldwide create attractive, engaging websites. If a simple landing page is all a company needs, they can use a landing page-specific service like Unbounce to design it.

Maintain an Active Social Media Presence

To maximize bookings in busy seasons and to keep your business on consumers’ minds in the offseason, it is vital that businesses maintain a social media presence that reminds customers of their existence year-round. When learning how to increase bookings, increasing awareness is an essential step.

This doesn’t mean just developing a presence on a single platform, but rather ensuring that the business is active on all three of the major social media outlets: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Again, this is something that larger companies can hire someone to do. For most companies, though, their CRM software may have a function that helps plan social media posting, with Zoho being one of the best that comes to mind. This software allows businesses to plan simultaneous posts across all three platforms to ensure that an employee can balance this new responsibility along with their other daily duties.

Develop a Customer Loyalty Program

One of the best ways to generate consistent business is to turn first-time consumers into repeat customers. Repeat customers come back not just for the season but for the product or service itself and are more likely to take advantage of sales and other promotions in the off-season. They are also the best way to gather positive reviews and referral business.

To encourage more repeat business, decision-makers should consider developing a loyalty program that offers rewards or discounts for repeat purchases. This gives consumers a reason to specifically choose a given business again and again since they have access to unique promotions that make it a better deal than others.

These programs can include:

  • Discounts on future purchases.
  • Free upgrades on rooms travel seats or recreational activities where applicable.
  • “Cashback” rewards or store credit for future purchases.

Offer Flexible Payment Options

When discussing how to increase bookings and revenue, making payment easier for consumers has to be a top priority. Financing is incredibly effective, as it gives consumers more buying power at the point of purchase, freeing up more and larger sales opportunities. In fact, companies that offer some form of consumer financing see an average 20-30% increase in conversion and a 30-50% increase in average ticket size.

There are many fintech providers that partner with businesses to allow them to offer financing to their customers. They develop software platforms that can be easily embedded into any website, point-of-sale, or billing system. The best consumer financing platforms can offer a wide variety of financing products to meet the needs of every customer, as well as a broad spectrum of underwriting requirements so that more consumers get approved.

How to Increase Bookings With Skeps

Travel, lodging, and recreational service providers all need quality lending partners. Skeps offers the only end-to-end POS financing platform that can help merchants provide:

  • Credit cards with rewards
  • Travel loans
  • Flexible payment plans

Our user-friendly software platform makes application, acceptance, and payment easy without taking consumers off a merchant’s website. Our omnichannel functionality allows our application to be embedded within any website or app. 

If a merchant is looking to make their consumers’ travel shopping experience faster, easier, and more flexible than ever before, there is no better partner to have than Skeps.

Do you have more questions about how to increase bookings?
Request a demo or contact us at  support@skeps.com!

Swati Bucha Swati Bucha

In the travel and recreation industries, seasonality is something every business owner prepares ...

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