One of the most profound changes in customer behaviour as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the switch to mobile bookings, is your booking experience ready?.

While the potential of mobile is hardly a new insight - Booking.com reported that more than 50% of their revenue was from mobile in 2018 - the need for renewed focus on this channel is now more pressing than ever.

At Triptease we’ve been tracking the relative resilience of mobile compared to desktop over the past few months, with mobile bookings taking less of a hit and recovering much faster. The percentage of mobile bookings is now at double pre-COVID levels, which suggests this is a trend that's here to stay.

The obvious concern for hotels right now is how to capitalize on this opportunity and provide the premium mobile experience that their customers expect. This is particularly challenging when internal teams are likely more stretched than they’ve ever been before.

A quick and simple way to optimize your mobile website right away is to use the mobile-ready message options available in the Triptease platform. These help you tailor the guest experience right across your website for all different types of guests. While these mobile nudge messages are a highly effective way to move people down your booking funnel and tempt them to convert with offers and promotions, their success ultimately depends on the quality of your broader mobile infrastructure.

Mobile messages are an effective way to guide customers towards your booking engine, but unfortunately the journey doesn't end when they arrive there. If your mobile booking experience is overly complex and confusing you’ll still lose potential guests back to those familiar OTAs who’ve spent time and money investing in an effortless mobile experience.

At Triptease we’ve increased our focus on this vital stage of the booking journey with the launch of the Express mobile experience - a bespoke, mobile-first booking flow that works seamlessly on top of your existing booking engine.

With booking speeds at half the time of a standard mobile experience, improved Google performance scores and no new integration required, Express is the simplest way to make sure that your mobile experience is ready to capture the booking recovery where it’s happening.

How guests enter the booking experience from your mobile website is your choice. You can configure Express to appear as your standard mobile booking experience for all users, or you can advertise it as an optional 'quick book' flow that mobile users can choose to select.

Like all Triptease products, the Express mobile experience is continuously being optimized based on real user activity. This is just the start of the Express experience - we’re developing the capability to build Targeted Messaging functionality directly into this mobile journey, allowing you to personalize the content for every single guest.

For most hotels it’s probably been some time since you reviewed and updated your mobile booking experience. Right now this is one of the most important steps to take as you begin your booking recovery. If you want to supercharge your mobile experience and get ready to capitalize on increasing demand get in touch with the Triptease team today to see how the Express mobile experience could work for your hotel.

Holly Groom is a Lead Product Marketing Manager at Triptease

www.triptease.com