Booking.com

Introduction

The two guest lecturers of today, are both employees of Booking.com, the world’s biggest online booking platform for accommodations. Jean-Marc Serex as well as Anna Schriefer work as Account Managers. If not cited differently the content in this blog entry is based on the presentation of the two lecturers or the accompanying slides. (Serex & Schriefer, 2017)

 

Empower people to experience the world

The corporate culture of Booking.com is represented by the slogan “empower people to experience the world”. To do so, their company is organized in four Parts. First, the "web marketing" where they do research and build traffic, second, "partner services" which encompasses product consultation and partner support, penultimate, "customer care" where customer experience is reinforced and complaints are handled and last, "front end" where the prefect shop experience is created as well as new features are developed.

 

The company was founded in Amsterdam in 1996 and it took Booking.com, formerly Booking.nl, one year to generate their first booking. In 2005, they joined the American company Priceline and together, they can ensure to keep their competitive advantage of being roughly one year ahead with technology. This is from utmost significance as Booking.com cannot rely on brand engagement but on offering innovations. Nowadays, Booking.com, available in 43 languages, lists more than 1’500’000 properties among 229 countries, encompassing around 122’560 destinations worldwide. Moreover, they employ more than 15’000 dedicated people in 205 offices, scattered among 70 countries, while generating 1’500’000 room night bookings every 24 hours.

 

Guest’s Perspective

The customer journey on Booking.com

People find Booking.com by directly opening the app or entering their website, through meta search like Kayak or TripAdvisor, through web marketing on google or last but not least via affiliates like KLM.

 

Especially important for Booking.com, is how the guest searches and when he decides to go on holiday. Hence, the consumers behaviour is that important for Booking.com to most efficiently apply online marketing measures.

 

The average visitor on Booking.com stays eight minutes, has seven page views, needs only 27 seconds when choosing a property and 36 seconds to look at it. This fast process can be linked to the filter usage Booking.com provides. They offer detailed search for hotels on their website. Guests can look for locations and for leisure or business hotels. Then they can further set the budget per night, decide on the star rating and different other options, such as property types, facilities, bed preferences and so on.

Figure 1: The life of a booking (Serex & Schriefer, 2017)

Review of your stay

When deciding about an ideal accommodation, reviews play an important role in the decision-making process of the guests. However, not only the score of the rating matters, but also the written content of the guests and the followed response of the accommodation provider are influencing how the score is perceived by the reader. Especially the fashion of the response needs to be chosen carefully as especially future potential guests are reading these responses.

 

Figure 2: Review Examples (Serex & Schriefer, 2017)

 

Partner’s perspective

With the term partners, the authors refer to accommodation providers.

 

Business model of Booking.com

The partners of Booking.com do not have to pay any registration fee to have access to the offered services of Booking.com. Due to the globally spread offices, the company is able to respond to the all year-round demand all over the globe. On top of that, multilingual assistance is available for the company’s partners 24 hours a day and seven days a week. As partner of Booking.com, the accommodation providers can profit of free online marketing. The partners’ contribution to the expenses of the Online Travel Agency (OTA) is a commission fee per unit sold on the Booking.com website. This so-called Commission-based model ensures that the OTA does not have to buy certain stock of rooms, but is acting as a promotional intermediary. Like this, the partners still have the flexibility to close this booking channel in case of full capacity. The content entered into the profile of the partner is available in up to 43 languages. The basic terms, for instance “double room” is translated automatically, whereas the descriptive text has to be translated separately. Whether or not to translate the content into another language is decided based on the data produced by the website visitors. If a significant number is having an IP-address from Russia, it will be decided to translate the content into Russian language. Finally, the whole online tool provided by Booking.com is aimed to be easy-to-use. This is also in the interest of Booking.com.

 

Potential to make the difference within the guest experience

The guest experience is an extensive process starting with the search for an ideal destination to travel to. After having decided for a destination, the searching process for accommodation is starting and this is where the partners of Booking.com have the possibility to make the difference in regard to the competitors. The published availability and content needs to be up-to-date and relevant for the customers. To this content belongs also high-quality pictures showing the accommodation in a convincing way. Finally, the pricing strategy is the third point which can be influenced by a partner of Booking.com. Examples for such pricing strategies are: non-refundable rates, rates including and excluding breakfast etc. The following three steps in the guest experience, namely the booking process, check-in and reviewing of the stay, are again not influenced by the accommodation providers.

 

Consultant Role

The partners of Booking.com are accessing the website over the extranet. There, they enter all the information concerning the room offers and its rates. Apart from entering all the necessary data into the system, the partner and the employees of Booking.com have access to the analysing tools within the extranet. Based on the information gathered (e.g. comparison of number of bookings of the OTA in the current year and the year before), Booking.com makes recommendations where possible, to improve the potential of their partners. Furthermore, Booking.com does also provide other products to improve the individual website of their customers, e.g. rate intelligence or installing their booking machine on a partner’s website who did not have one until then. As it is very often the case that the property owners do not have the time to analyse this data, the employees of Booking.com are preparing them previously to the personal meetings.

 

Marketing and Distribution

Their over 13'000 key distribution partners do not have the possibility to have hotel bookings on their website. Consequently, Booking.com offers them affiliate products such as the so-called "search box". The partners do not need their own booking engine but can integrate the search box on their site. Additionally, they can survey their performance with the provided tools by Booking.com. With this information, the partner can strategically manage their targeting. For example, if they want to push the availability for Russians, they increase or set a new commission rate.

 

Data is king

No matter how small changes on a website are: if they have an impact on the reservation, implement them. Booking.com is constantly adapting A/B testing with their own website and found out that even the smallest changes like a shadow or a line in the layout impact the user's online behaviour.

 

New developments

Users often make a preselection on their smartphones, then check availability on for instance a tablet and finally book on a desktop. Not surprisingly then that the increase in the use of smartphones or tablets for preselection/reservation on Booking.com is 50%. Also, the number of bookings being made on smartphones grew by 33%. All in all, they say that people in need for a hotel room last minute rather go online than call the hotel with their phone. If they just want to get information, Booking.com offers an application in which a support chatbot, the "Booking Assistant", is available. The messaging platform merges Booking.com's customer service support with artificial intelligence technology. Users can get support for their upcoming bookings and responses to their requests in time, all through an intuitive chat interface. The Booking assistant represents a very valuable timesaving innovation as Booking.com's accommodation partners can this way reduce its inbound, the system takes away the work. Further, Booking.com does not only sell room nights but also flights, offers car rental and restaurant reservations. This is only possible due to their corporation with the Priceline group. Flights can be booked through the meta search engine Kayak, because its integrated in the Booking.com system. The guests profit from a smoother way in their booking process, as they never have to leave the page.

 

Working at Booking.com

If one is a data-driven person and loves challenges, that person would match Booking.com. In terms of time, one needs to recognize that the constant changing environment needs people who can quickly adapt and are flexible. Speaking of which, flexibility should fill the daily work life, as no employee has its own desk. E-commerce is just a few clicks away, A/B Testing an everyday process and challenges to the team and tasks are fixed in their calendar. The international multicultural environment is waiting for you, do not wait for long but apply now on AboutBooking.com.

 

References

Serex, J.-M., & Schriefer, A. (2017). booking.com. Chur: HTW Chur.

 

Illustrations

Serex, J.-M., & Schriefer, A. (2017). booking.com. Chur: HTW Chur.