Applications for hotel booking are in-demand for startup companies and hoteliers. Such solutions help them automate working processes, attract more customers and take the businesses to a new level.
However, many details should be learned to create a full-fledged accommodation booking solution. This post will help you explain the notion of such apps, their kinds, monetization strategies, and other necessities.
The Essence of Booking Solution and Tips to Think About Before Development
A hotel booking app is a software developed for the accommodation reservation business to attract more customers and allow them to make safe and secure room bookings comfortably. Businesses also benefit from increasing their flow effectiveness and receiving more competitive advantages over their rivals.
But you should keep in mind that the accommodation booking app creation needs serious preparation even in case you’ve decided to apply to a fintech software development company. We’ll tell you about the essential steps below.
Identify your business aims and requirements by selecting an app type. You can choose the following booking solution categories:
Types of hotel reservation solutions
- Aggregators may offer the customers all the data about your particular hotel, including booking prices, discounts, or upcoming events.
- Online Agency apps will care not only about accommodation booking issues but also about related questions (such as buying airplane tickets or booking vehicles).
- Solutions for hotel chains will provide users with all the information concerning the accommodation booking in a specific hotel chain, changes of condition, etc.
Think about the area of distribution. Before going with your app deployment worldwide, it would be better to launch the solution in your country’s market. This strategy will let you test a developed application in a cost-effective and time-saving manner.
Offer Unique Value Propositions (UVP) to your customers. Find out widely known booking services’ propositions that allow them to stay popular among people. For instance, the last-time reservation offered by Booking.com is widely demanded by users.
Provide users with information search bases. Applying to hotels to book a room, people should know more about a place they’ll reserve an accommodation. Booking.com solves this issue: they make contracts with different hotels that install the offered software. So that Booking.com gets an opportunity to monitor the rooms’ availability and provide relevant data to customers.
Design an admin panel. Monitor and manage the hotel information effectively through a smooth admin panel.
How to Create a Perfect-Functioning Booking App?
Before working on a full-fledged app building, you should think about your application’s Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version. Let’s talk more about the vital things for a hotel reservation solution.
MVP features for a reservation app
- Sign up/login features. Users with no registration in your app should get it by applying to such options as social network login or getting access through entering a password or credentials (e.g., e-mail).
- UI/UX. Booking app screens should be as straightforward as possible. Care about the location tracking feature to let users find hotels nearby.
- Search engine. You should implement a flexible search system containing various filters. Moreover, provide your users with an accommodation map showing all the accessible opportunities for rent.
- Accommodation details. The indicated data (e.g., costs, address and photo, sharing, etc.) should be given to users to make more cost-effective and quicker decisions.
You should also care about payment options for users to book accommodation. Offer them also buttons to contact the hotel managers and even an opportunity to cancel the reservation in an emergent case.
After implementing the primary part of the functionality, you can enhance your reservation software with the most useful advanced features. These are some examples of the additional functionality you can add:
- Automatical language identification
- Built-in currency exchange
- Accommodation availability prediction
- Chatbots/messengers for client support
- User profiles for storing reservation data.
What Monetization Strategies Can You Use?
There are countless varieties of apps in Google Play or the iOS App Store, including hotel booking ones. Your task is not only to create a solution appreciated by the most users but also to convert such popularity into a profit. For this purpose, in-app purchases, paid solutions, and ad monetization strategies are typically used.
There are some monetization approaches you can use for accommodation booking solutions:
- A service fee is provided for any reservation via your app.
- Advertising approach, when hotels pay money for promotion through your software.
- A paid subscription allows users to utilize unique propositions and discounts of an app for a definite period.
- The marketplace strategy requires commission payments from hotels listed in your app.
Booking App Development: How Much Does It Cost?
Deciding to build an online reservation software, keep in mind that the app development cost is proportional to the amount of time it takes. So, based on a $50 hourly rate for developers’ services, let’s see how much it may cost to construct a hotel reservation app:
- Mobile development – $19,250 (one OS)
- Back-end – $16,000;
- Admin panel development – $9,500;
- UI/UX interface – $7,000 (one OS)
- Total development (Android/iOS) – $54,250;
- Total development cost (Android&iOS) – $77,500.
You should bear in mind that the above costs are rough. The exact estimations can be given to you in collaboration with an IT provider.
Bottom Line
We’ve told only the basics of hotel reservation app building. If you require digging deeper into this topic, an experienced software development vendor can help you. The vendor’s specialists will assist you in making a feature list for your app, prepare prototypes and wireframes, and develop, test, and deploy the profitable solution entirely fitting your business needs.
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