Please note that this blog refers to a Triptease product - the Express Mobile Experience - which has now been closed down. You can find out more about the decision to discontinue support for this product here.
If you've already downloaded the Triptease 2021 Hotel Recovery Guide, you'll know that mobile bookings were one of six key data trends that are predicted to drive the resurgence of travel post-Covid.
Product planning at Triptease is based on exactly these kinds of data insights. We combine our industry-leading global data analysis with continuous customer feedback to ensure we're always building products and features that will increase direct bookings for hotels - something that's more important than ever as the industry recovers from its toughest challenge to date.
Over the past year our traffic acquisition tools (Metasearch and Retargeting) have provided a lifeline for hotels, finding high value customers who were still searching with intent to travel and bringing them straight to the hotel website. Once there, our onsite conversion tools (Targeted Messages and the Express Mobile Experience) helped to ensure those customers booked a room.
We've seen that when onsite personalization is combined with a targeted traffic acquisition campaign such as metasearch, it can make customers up to 118% more likely to book. So if you're spending money bringing customers to your website, you can't afford not to have high performing conversion tools in place too.
Unfortunately most hotel website optimization tools focus exclusively on the desktop experience. With Covid-19 rapidly accelerating consumer preference for mobile bookings, we've been busy building new features and optimizing the performance of Triptease Convert to ensure it continues to maximize bookings across desktop and - crucially - mobile. That's why we're pleased to announce the launch of our newly-upgraded Triptease Convert tools. Read on to learn more about the new features available as part of our enhanced, mobile-ready Triptease Convert offering.
A faster, more personalized mobile booking journey with the Express Mobile Experience
The Express Mobile Experience takes the content from your existing mobile booking engine and optimizes it for mobile, providing a simple, streamlined booking experience that's up to twice as fast as a typical mobile booking engine.
It doesn't replace your booking engine - it's simply a 'skin' that sits on top of what's already there. It's designed to load faster (which is really important on mobile) as well as having a layout that works much better on a mobile screen. It simplifies the booking process and reduces the number of steps required for your customer to make their booking.
The Express Mobile Experience continuously improves and optimizes based on real customer behavior. We know from tracking thousands of hotels across hundreds of booking engines that Express outperforms hotel booking engines in terms of speed, accessibility, best practices and performance. Express is designed to tackle the three most common issues faced by mobile hotel websites:
- Slow loading speeds
- Too many steps to make a booking
- Poor user experience design
Based on customer feedback we've added a range of additional features to ensure that the Express Mobile Experience is simple to set up, personalize and measure:
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The Express Mobile Experience can be personalized with an embedded Price Check Message. Traditional pop-up messages disrupt the customer experience on mobile. Using them can result in Google actively penalizing your website in search results. This is why our existing Triptease mobile messages are designed to slide in seamlessly, take up only a small section of the screen and can appear on a timed delay, ensuring that your SEO ranking is unlikely to be impacted. The next step in optimizing mobile for hotels was to design the Express experience so that personalization can be integrated directly into the user interface - no pop-ups and no demotion in Google search results. Price Check is Triptease's highest-converting message type so it's the first message we've made available to use in the Express Mobile Experience. Look out for more personalization developments soon.
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The Google Lighthouse performance scores for the Express Mobile Experience can be tracked in the Triptease Platform. View your Express performance, speed and other best practice scores - and compare them to your mobile booking engine - right in the Triptease Platform.
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Express events can now be tracked in Google Analytics. If you prefer to track your own performance data in Google Analytics, you can send Express events to your own account to monitor alongside your other metrics.
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Kick off the onboarding process for the Express Mobile Experience yourself in the Triptease Platform. Speed up the time it takes to go live with Express by uploading your own hotel information in the Triptease Platform and submitting it for testing by the Triptease team.
Due to demand, we're currently inviting existing Convert customers to sign up to a waitlist to access the Express Mobile Experience. If you'd like to start offering a premium booking experience to your mobile customers, you can sign up to the waitlist here.
Improve the customer experience across desktop and mobile with Targeted Messages
When your onsite experience is personalized for every visitor, conversion rates significantly increase. For hotels using Triptease Targeted Messages that conversion rate uplift can be as much as 16%.
For many hotels, enhancing the website experience has been forced to take a back seat over the past year as teams dealt with travel bans, closures and adapting to new cleanliness and cancellation procedures. This made access to Targeted Messages more vital than ever as the tool continued to provide a quick and simple way to create targeted, personalized content - and to highlight hotel policy changes and emergency measures easily to guests.
As more and more customers start to book travel again, it's a good time to review your onsite experience to ensure that visitors find exactly what they're looking for and make their booking on your website. To help you do that, we've launched a range of new Targeted Messaging features across both desktop and mobile.
- Change the position of Targeted Messages on desktop and mobile. It's really important that your personalized messaging works with the layout of your website, and doesn't hide other important content that customers need to see. You can now change the position of all Nudge, Price Check, Email Capture and Undercut Messages on your desktop website, as well as Nudge and Price Check Messages on mobile.
- Showcase reviews on desktop and mobile with review message templates. Display your customer review ratings on desktop or mobile quickly and easily, using a Nudge Message.
Continuously improve your performance with parity monitoring and direct booking data, benchmarking and insights
Triptease Convert customer also get access to the Parity Monitoring dashboard. Hotels that improve their rate parity can see a conversion rate increase of up to 34% so this is a really crucial step in improving onsite experience. There are a range of Price Check Messages available for desktop, mobile and the Express Mobile Experience to help you reinforce that you have the best price when customers visit your website.
In addition to this, we've continued to add to the range of direct booking data insights available to Triptease customers, with new features including:
- A heatmap calendar that helps you to spot trends in your search and booking volumes
- The ability to filter your direct booking data by device, so you can see exactly how your hotel is performing across desktop, mobile and tablet
- Mobile data in your monthly Triptease performance email, outlining your total mobile searchers, your mobile conversion rate and the potential revenue opportunity you could be missing out on by not optimizing your mobile channel
Watch this space for more updates from Triptease Convert!
This is just the first step in a focussed effort to increase the impact of Convert tools for both mobile and desktop. Keep an eye on our Product Updates page in the Triptease Platform for all the latest news and feature launches.
Already a Triptease customer? Get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to learn more about the new Convert product - or click below to join the waitlist to upgrade.
If you're new to Triptease and interested to hear more about how our Attract and Convert products work together to provide personalized experiences across the entire guest booking journey and increase direct bookings for hotels, get in touch with the team today.