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The world is stepping into the digital future and hotel industry is one of those experiencing an exponential growth and positive response. Creating a dedicated mobile app for hotel booking is the best way for hotel business owners to beat the soaring competition. With new emerging players already serving customers with digitally sophisticated hotel booking services from the very beginning, established hotel brands are compelled to join the revolution at present.
From accommodation, online payment to stay management and price comparison features, an ideal hotel booking app must contain all the vital features to deliver a complete gratifying experience. If you also wish to flourish in your hotel business by crafting a perfect hotel booking app, you must consider certain essential features to make it a huge success. Here are must-have features in your hotel booking app to facilitate maximum convenience to customers:
1) Reservation facility
The first and foremost feature every hotel booking app user is going to find solace in is, the ability to confirm reservation for an accommodation. Travelers and explorers want to be assured that they have secured their hotel rooms of specific choice before they begin the trip.
This feature must grace the front opening page of the app with options for booking accommodation at popular hotels in the list.
This is where they are allowed to compare different hotel rooms and review all the details along with price, distance and amenities offered before the reservation is finalized.
2) User Account
To convert casual visitor into a regular app patron, users should be encouraged to enter their iTunes or Google Account details to make their personal account.
Alternatively, they can also use their social profiles online to create the user account. This feature enables users to store their personal favorites, preferences and desired destinations to explore later.
Having an user account means getting notified of latest offers on travel arrangements, hotel booking and discounts, or viewing their previous history of trips.
3) User-friendly interface
You want to ensure ease of navigation to enable users to check different app pages in a way they are supposed to do. For this to be possible, your app must have slick, intuitive and user-friendly interface with pages that load in no time.
The interface must look and function equally well across all smart devices with equal consistency. This will save their time, encouraging users to to plan trips via app.
4) Travel Arrangements
It is important to incorporate even the minutest requirements of a user, as they seek apps for making travel and hotel room arrangements. Users buy convenience and pay for convenience.
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They opt for services that offers great ease and comfort even in booking travel options as they want to ensure their trip is smooth and hassle-free. You can think of offering flight booking, bar and restaurant services and cab on rent in addition to hotel services.
5) Comprehensive Payment system
Customers will prefer to pay using their debit or credit card for making online payment. Build a secure payment funnel to ensure users have a safe environment while making payments for their rooms,, flights etc. . Make it easy for customers to use your app and complete the entire transaction successfully.
You can also facilitate booking a hotel room during festive season with a small down payment. Your booking engine must be solid enough to protect customer’s private information.
6) Offline booking capability
Nowadays having an offline usage capability makes mobile apps popular among users. Enables users to book hotels using on-desk system.
You can administer back-end system in order to book rooms for customers. You should also monitor online reservations made using your websites.
7) Multi-linguistic and multi-currency support
People accessing your website or mobile app would be the citizen from different countries that have their own original language and currency in place. To expand your business profile, its important to serve your app for users in the language they speak locally.
Once, if they fail to understand and connect with your app, then you will lose big portion of prospects. To retain them, build an app that welcomes languages and currencies of people around the world.
8) Management of Room facilities
Users should be able to see real-time details about available rooms and suites, amenities and comfort level offered and more.
You should be able to easily update rooms details, edit its status and features, cancellations and rebooking and reallocation as the demand changes.
9) Handy Search engine
Hotel booking app can’t sustain the market without having a handy search engine option that allows customers to search for hotels in a desirable location.
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Enable a handy search engine feature that offers suggestions for current availability of rooms in preferred places and time.
10) Weather updates
Customers are concerned whether they will be able to enjoy the services they paid for on a given date. They want to check the weather of the place they are interested in. Therefore, the app should provide information and forecast on current weather condition as well.
11) Integrated third-party map service
Both iOS and Android offers their own map services for directional guide and location detection. To help customers discover your hotel, you can offer third-party map integration like Google Maps that allows users to spot different hotel stay option in the same location as your hotel.
12) Image Gallery
Showing images of what hotel rooms look like when seen from inside is another effective way to attract more audience to your hotel booking app.
Capture spectacular images of your hotel rooms, amenities and other luxuries in their exactness that helps users decide what to select from the available options.
13) Discounts and deals
There is rarely any service-based mobile app that does not offer exciting deals and alluring discounts to customers. This tricky and useful feature further captivates more prospects looking for amazing deals on travel and hotel booking.
Regular users must be notified of latest seasonal offers that may appeal to their taste. You can develop a system that creates custom offers for new and existing customers.
14) Multi-booking system
This is another gem feature if you are looking for catering to customers with an undeniable value proposition. Let your customers book different rooms on separate days in single attempt so that they can save efforts and time needed for double booking. This sophisticated provision will make customers repeatedly visit your hotel booking app.
15) Dashboard
To take a complete look of most essential hotel booking information, you need a sleek dashboard with information on recent bookings, conversion rates, location-specific success, sales data, online visitors, etc. the statistics and analytics adds much power to finding growth potential by studying strength and performance metrics.
16) Social Media sharing
Customers have common disposition of choosing a hotel booking app that contains social media buttons or icons. They can share their trip on socials and can also visit and like your Facebook, Twitter and Google pages.
As they follow your social profiles, you get a chance to engage with them more with updates on hotel events and promotional offers.
17) Review System
Reviews and comment system is obvious to find in almost all service-related business apps. Reviews are prioritized by online customers due to its authenticity as a personal recommendation. Checking other users’ opinions and experiences about hotel booking helps new users decide what they need to choose.
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With that said, good reviews fascinate new travelers and influence them to subscribe to your offers on regular basis. Implement a healthy review system in your hotel reservation system for enhanced business advantages.
18) Online Chat
More features your app supports, more likely you are to get your app featured in top 10 apps in the online app stores. Therefore, it is wise practice to integrate online chat feature to enable instant messaging service for customers.
Using chat messages, customers can readily get their queries answered, which allows you to convert more inquiries into service booking. The prompt communication between a prospect and hotel rep ensured by chat plugin thus increase your chance to gain massive conversion.
Conclusion
You must make a powerful strategy to craft a compelling, functional and highly scalable hotel booking app. To turn your conceptual imagination into actual virtual product, you need an equally powerful collaboration with a professional mobile app development company who has in-depth know how of all the unique features and functionalities needed to make your app rock on the global platform.
Partner with a reputed Android and iOS mobile app developers who are versed in orchestrating their experience and insight in travel industry, customer behavior and can build a flawless app with intuitive interface and outstanding personality.
