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The evolution of the online hotel booking form

February 15, 2012 | Hotel Marketing

Far too many hotel websites, upon collecting stay dates and basic room details in a widget, send users off to a separate booking interface that looks almost nothing like the page from which they started. Here is how the new generation of booking widget should look like.

Today we see that booking widgets are in a pretty solid place. A survey of major hotel websites confirms that the dominant standard is now respecting the time and preferences of visitors, and conforming to their mental model, letting them quickly and accurately set arrival and departure dates.

Small pop-up calendars are now the standard for date entry. Not only does allowing visitors to select their date from a calendar eliminate chances for formatting problems, it is a big help to visitors who are more familiar with “next weekend” than their actual travel dates. The ability to see that the date you are selecting is a Friday, and that it is next Friday as intended, not only reduces error, it increases the visitor’s sense of mastery of, and confidence in, the process.

But as in so many things, taking care of one issue exposes the more complex ones it was obscuring. As the layers of friction are removed from getting dates entered, significant hassles with the next two steps of booking are potentially exposed.

Get the full story at TIG Global

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