Conversion

Four steps is the whole booking engine

30 July 20265 min read

Dates, room, guest, payment. Every screen after that is a screen you added to make somebody leave.

A guest reads three pages of careful photography, decides, and presses Book. What happens next is usually the least considered moment on the entire website: a redirect to a different domain, in a different typeface, behind a progress bar that would like an account created first.

Four minutes of atmosphere are spent in a single click. And the redirect is not even the expensive part — the expensive part is that nobody who commissioned the site treats the engine as part of it. The photography was art-directed; the checkout was procured.

A reservation flow needs four things: the dates, the room, who is coming, and how they are paying. Everything else on the screen is either a question you already know the answer to, or an upsell you have decided is worth some percentage of abandoned bookings. Both are choices. Very few properties have made them deliberately.

Measure it before you argue about it. Take the funnel apart step by step, and the step where a third of your guests leave will not be the price — it will be the one you never looked at.

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