Since this category was invented, hotel booking engines have been designed to accomplish one task: reserve a room. Since that time, we’ve added packages, add-ons, shuttle services, upsells, dynamic pricing, flexible payment options, image-rich user interfaces and plenty of other shiny toys to help convert, but we haven’t really solved the anything cart challenge for full-service hotels.
Namely, spa appointments, restaurant reservations, golf tee times, activities, excursions and event tickets have always been siloed within their own systems of record, with the only bridge – or dare we use the dirty word ‘workaround’ – often being a link-out or a concerted prearrival campaign to secure those ancillary reservations.
But as we all know, every additional click introduces friction, while every disconnected inventory system creates opportunities to lose ancillary revenue or create service conflicts. That model is beginning to disappear. No promises for right now, though!
The next generation of booking technology is FINALLY evolving from room reservation software into full commerce platforms capable of merchandising the entire guest journey. Rather than treating guestrooms as the final transaction, hotels can now present accommodations alongside dining, wellness, recreation and destination experiences within one continuous purchasing flow, and often presented agnostically to where the guest begins (as opposed to restricting guests to a hotel-first booking flow).
Behind the scenes, a competitive advantage for the intrepid new guard of flexible booking engines that can make rooms as well as ancillaries is through behavioral data. Hotels have long relied on historical reporting to evaluate performance, but anonymized shopping behavior now provides a forward-looking view into demand patterns, booking windows and consumer intent.
As speculation here, if this new level of intelligence can get you even a 2% channel shift year over year based off what it learns about how best to convert prospects, then that’s something worth investigating as highly valuable for gains to net revenues.
But the strategic value extends well beyond channel optimization. Every ancillary booked before arrival reduces operational pressure, improves staffing visibility and significantly increases total revenue per guest. This part should be obvious. More importantly, however, it gives travelers confidence that the experiences motivating their trip are secured before they arrive. In other words, the pleasure of and trust in the booking experience can have a reciprocal effect back on the likelihood of booking in the first place (and also, to not cancel a booking).
Artificial intelligence is, of course, accelerating this transformation, but perhaps not in the way many expected. While conversational AI has become exceptionally good at researching trips and spitting out itineraries, fully autonomous travel booking remains some distance away due to the complexity of integrating ARI across multiple systems – often legacy systems at that.
Instead, the immediate opportunity may lie in AI-assisted commerce. Rather than forcing guests to navigate dozens of menus and hundreds of options, an augmented model can begin curating recommendations based on stated preferences, trip purpose and party composition, all with the booking flow or at the entry to it.
For example, a family vacation should surface entirely different room types, activities and dining recommendations than an anniversary getaway or golf retreat. The objective here is not simply automation but intelligent merchandizing that reduces decision fatigue while increasing conversion across all revenue centers rather than just the rooms.
This personalization will soon be able to be extended beyond the initial booking. Returning guests should no longer encounter generic hotel websites that continue trying to sell rooms they’ve already reserved. Instead, digital storefronts are being coded to respond to the context of the entire booking lifecycle, presenting relevant ancillary offers based on previous browsing behavior and recognized hotel reservations.
Inevitably here, the website itself becomes a living extension of the golden guest profile in the CRM and the concierge team that’s referencing it. Some booking engines are even adding a destination commerce layer with flights and insurance in one cart.
Overall, we are rapidly converging on the promise of a unified hotel booking experience. There’s still a lot of pain in migrating, but the time to value is rapidly compressing to make this a feasible IT project for the next year.
