Why is hotel website chat growing so quickly?

The reason that more and more hotels are joining in the website chat trend is easy: it works.

Beyond the obvious fit for hotels that care about their hospitality online, it also offers an important edge. With a direct connection to your guests (and potential guests), you’re able to offer personalized service, answer questions, and perhaps most importantly: offer promos beyond the view of OTAs.

What does that mean? It means that you can offer promos through your site which aren’t really part of your site, per se — to win the best of both worlds. You win the higher search ranking in OTAs (since your official published room rate is still high), while still having the flexibility to offer lower rates to website visitors, directly in chat. Very cool.

Here are a few of the leaders in online hospitality, forging the path with online chat.

Le Meurice, Paris

Travel + Leisure lists Le Meurice as #1 in World’s Best Hotels of Europe. We’re talkin’ about the big boys, here. As part of this prestigious position, they are bolstered by the presence of their ever-present chat feature, floating in the corner of their site on every page.

Hotel Noir, Prague

Hotel Noir has an ever-present chat feature that lets potential guests reach out to connect. Notice how they list perks in relation to direct booking, and mention a “best rate guarantee”? It’s easy to arrange pricing to your liking when you’ve got a direct, real-time messaging link with your booking guests.

What luxury guests are looking for.

You may not be aiming for “luxury”, but this applies to all. Here are a few insights into guest expectations, and why luxury hotels incorporate website chat.

Not only do luxury hotel brands invest heavily in service training and empowering their staff, they showcase that dedication to service and genuine hospitality directly on their website itself. Ritz Carlton’s staff lives by their Gold Standard credo to “fulfill even the unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests.”

This commitment must extend to the first touch many potential guests have with your hotel, through the phone and chat agents made available via your website.

From 10 Secrets of Luxury Hotel Websites (Part 2)

Outshine your competition.

Since this is an emerging feature, you may get the edge on competition if you’re in a region where this isn’t prevalent, yet.

While your [competition’s] reservation teams are still plugging away call-by-call and their front desk staff are slowly answering emails from the day before, your team can be nimble with live chat and interact with more than one traveler at a time, in real-time.

From Want More Bookings? Get chatty.

Who else? You.

As trends go, now is the moment. You’ve got wonderful opportunity to gain an edge and enjoy substantially more bookings by acting now.

Luckily enough, we’ve got just the thing for you.

Try direct booking chat on your site.

We’ve got just the thing for you: try our hotel direct booking chat free. You’ll wonder what took you so long.