Trends in hotel booking-engine design

This article expresses the result of the study made by the Università della Svizzera italiana, as the importance of attractive online booking engines for hoteliers, and its future trends.

The online booking engine is an online reservation system that enables guests to check room availabilities, room rates, and book rooms. This element is a strategic tool for hoteliers as it is one source of business for them. It has been proven that an attractive and easy to use booking engine is more likely to receive room reservations.

The study was made on 162 hotel chains booking engines, as to evaluate the how to design or improve a booking engine to make it more attractive and welcoming.
There are a few important elements for a booking engine to be successful. The booking engine button must be easy to see on the hotel's website, and most importantly it must lead through only a couple of steps up to the reservation, and be trustworthy. In other words, it should have 2-3 steps such as: 1st - check availability by entering the dates; 2nd - check the room types and rates, and choose which the one that suits best; 3rd - proceed to the reservation payment. Indeed, if a guest does not feel comfortable with the website, either because there are too many steps and information at once, or because the website does not seem secure enough, the reservation will not proceed.

This study suggests that the future booking engines should become a recommendation system rather than being a system that informs the guests on the hotel's availability. It should be more human-like oriented. This brings me to the question of how is it possible to make a reservation system become more of an advice tool for guests? Does that imply adding more criteria while checking the availability of the hotel, like a reservation agent would ask?
I wonder ...

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