Hotel Booking Made Better for Business Travel

Hotel Booking Made Better for Corporate Travel

• Hotel booking is one of the most important aspects of corporate travel, but details for individual properties can be difficult to find.
• Improving performance in hotel booking platforms can reduce complaints of slow searches while providing more quality hotel properties.
• Smaller details like interactive maps, health and safety metrics, and personal preferences all contribute to a stronger business travel program.
• This article is for travel managers who need to improve the hotel booking experience in their corporate travel program. 

For business travelers, hotel choice may be the most important decision of a trip. From the trade show staff to the sales team to the CEO, property location and amenities matter to travelers. So does a fast, easy booking experience.

Perhaps no one understands this more than corporate travel managers. Travel managers bear the brunt of employee frustration when the search process is tedious, details are hard to find, and the ideal results are outside of policy or sold out.

Modern technology that takes the user experience into account improves not only the booking experience, but it also improves the performance of the corporate travel office. Elevating travel technology elevates the traveler experience. Empowering travelers with individualized, accessible experiences eliminates distractions, saves money, and increases productivity. The bottom line is that travel is better for business when it’s better for travelers.

For the hotel booking flow, an improved search process with enhanced features makes life easier for all involved.

Hotel search speed and performance

With , travelers get the support they need to make the right hotel choice, improving organizational performance. The foundation for efficiency and a good user experience is fast search results.

Older technology and legacy systems can take up to 30 seconds to provide hotel results. Deem, on the other hand, provides comprehensive search results in a fraction of the time. For busy executives and frequent travelers, that’s time they could be using to focus on the work at hand. 

Travelers can also filter out properties without vacancy from their results or highlight preferred locations first. With search results that provides the exact information that a traveler wants, they can quickly find a good match while reducing complaints of slow searches at the same time.

Hotel booking: It’s all in the details

The little things can make a big difference when making hotel choices easier. Let’s say a traveler will be working out of their hotel room. They’ll probably want free Wi-Fi and a business center close by. 24/7 coffee and late-night room service might be essentials. A traveler cooped up in a hotel room may want to stretch their legs in a pool, stroll through an outdoor area, or get a workout in at a fitness center.

Deem automatically provides these kinds of details with simple, descriptive messaging to create a more intuitive user experience. Not only does it simplify shopping for travelers, it also ensures on-policy reservations, less billing surprises, and a simplified experience for travelers.

Simplifying these types of decisions means providing a unique level of detail through features such as:

Interactive maps

Location, location, location. It can make or break a hotel experience, and some descriptions on hotel sites can fall short of reality. What if the location is inconvenient, or is in a neighborhood that feels uncomfortable? A robust, interactive map can bridge the gap between description and reality. 

In Deem, users can zoom in an out of maps, move them around, and search new areas. Pins and hover-over text provide photos, pricing, and exact distances to and from public transportation, convention centers, and other landmarks. 

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Health and safety metrics

Location is about more than just distance. When health and safety information is built into the booking flow, travelers can easily make safer choices. 

Deem’s award-winning Travel SafetyCheck offers scores for neighborhoods to help users know how safe an area is for women and LGBTQ+ travelers, for example, as well as review hotel sanitation policies. The maps also display metrics on current and historic COVID-19 case rates in the area.

Negotiated amenities

Company perks at certain properties put the fun and convenience into business travel. Free parking, free breakfast, and complimentary happy hours are all welcome bonus items. With Deem, travel managers can customize up to 10 amenities to reflect their unique corporate perks. 

When configured, these perks appear automatically in search results, showing travelers exactly what types of extra items they can expect at different hotels. This can also help lower off-platform bookings where company-specific information is not available.

Travel managers can further customize their sites to show preferred rates on a customer-by-customer basis while also clearly indicating which hotels are the most preferred partners.

Eco-friendly travel

Illustrating an organization’s corporate responsibility to shareholders and other stakeholders is more important than ever. That’s why Deem has partnered with sustainability data provider Thrust Carbon to create EcoCheck. With EcoCheck, travelers get access to accurate emissions ratings measured by multiple systems like DEFRA Fuel methodology, ICAO, spend methodology and more.

By presenting accurate carbon emissions data directly within the booking flow, Deem and EcoCheck gives travelers a way to quickly assess the ecological impact of a hotel property and individual rooms. Of course, sustainability goes beyond just hotel rooms, and EcoCheck was built with tools to measure the carbon emissions of a flight, a car rental, or even a ride with Uber. 

Reviews and comparisons

Deem has partnered with industry leading review curator TripAdvisor to give travelers a quick way to gauge whether a hotel is right for them. Deem allows business travelers to access TripAdvisor’s star ratings and in-depth traveler reviews on any hotel property. 

Sometimes, the right hotel choice isn’t immediately apparent, but astute travelers know to look for trends in review comments to decipher a property’s real story. That’s why Deem lets travelers compare up to six hotels to line up all the important details to facilitate a fast and easy decision.

Personal preferences

It can be difficult for travelers to keep track of which specific property belongs to which hotel brand. The Marriott Bonvoy loyalty program, for example, includes more than 30 brands. That type of information weighs heavy for travelers who want to get those sweet, sweet loyalty points. It turns out that when it comes to getting free points for reimbursable business trips, people are all aboard. 

That’s why Deem can save all of your traveler’s loyalty information. Gone are the days of opening multiple browser windows, hunting down membership information for specific hotel chains. Instead, Deem keeps all those details front and center when looking for hotels. Deem also remembers recent and frequent hotels, presenting those first to create an intuitive experience while allowing travel managers to customize results based on policy. 

Better booking results in better decisions and better travel. As the corporate travel office transitions into a more complex role of mobilizing a dispersed employee base, traveler-centered technology will help organizations overcome new challenges and benefit from new efficiencies.

You might also be interested in:

1. Do you know which travel and expense operation technology companies are Deem partners?
2. Does travel and expense technology need to be packaged from one company?
3. Can Workday be used with corporate travel technology?
4. What is business travel software usability and why is it important?
5. Is your travel and expense software mobile?

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