How to Build a Hotel Booking App: All You Need to Know to Succeed

In recent years, the travel industry has reached a new level. An increasing number of people prefer to monitor prices and book a room in advance. As a result, hotel owners, startups, and businesses are interested in creating hotel booking apps.

Statistics show that despite a short-term drop in the traveling market in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the situation has now leveled off, and the revenue of travel apps will only increase in the coming years. Thus, the profit of such applications, which is 360 million for 2022, will be 540 million by 2026, which is a significant increase in just 4 years.

Read this article to clarify everything about developing such apps: from the kinds of such apps and their monetization to the demanded parts and development process.

 

Something to Regard Before Development

Before diving into the building details, you should understand the following points better:

Choose the class of a future app. For example, there are such hotel booking apps: Online Travel Agencies (multiple booking capabilities), Hotel Aggregators (providing information about many hotels), or Hotel Chain apps.

Determine the market. You may start with the local market and then reach worldwide or target the world market immediately. This choice depends on your goals and planned development budget.

Determine your strengths. To compete successfully in such a rapidly growing market, you must have certain advantages over your competitors.

Select a hotel data source. Your app needs up-to-date information about your hotel or partner hotels to be truly functional. This point is complicated, and a few methods to achieve such synchronization exist. An experienced vendor will help you figure it out.

After you determine these fundamental points, let's consider what features are included in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and how to make an MVP app.

 

Must-Have Features for MVP

In most cases, the hotel booking app includes some basic functionality: these must-have elements make up the MVP. We will list them below:

1. Sign Up. Although registration should not be demanded to access basic features, the ability to create an account makes communication with each user easier. You'll be able to use all marketing and retargeting tools. Several authorization options, such as email and password or social networks, are worth considering. 
2. Booking Screen. It needs the most careful approach since this is essentially the application's primary function. Fields are required for all crucial data, but no unnecessary details should exist. 
3. Search. The search process must be clear and straightforward. For users' convenience, it should contain the following parameters: destination, arrival/departure dates, number of people and rooms, etc. Also, you can add filters, a map, and sorting for an even more convenient search process. 
4. Placement details screen. Your app should have the following information about each accommodation: photo, location, price, basic information about the housing and its policies, etc. 
5. Booking and payment. Now we come to the stage where the user is ready to book and pay for the stay through your app. To do this, first, the user must enter his personal information if he has not registered before and seen all the booking details. For successful payment through the application, a payment gateway must be integrated into it. Contact an experienced developer for the implementation. 
6. Cancellation policy. Your choice to add it to your app or not. However, the ability to cancel a booking in the circumstance of trouble is greatly appreciated by users.

You can see all the points of placement details on the example of Booking.com.

Essential elements of the hotel details screen

You may add extra features such as recommendations, in-app messenger, and virtual assistant, but they are not mandatory at the first stage.

 

Monetization Strategies for a Hotel Booking App

Let's discuss how you can earn from your hotel booking app. The most successful in such cases are the following monetization models:

• Service fee. You can charge a certain percentage for each booking made through your app from users or hotels. 
• Subscription. You can suggest a paid subscription to access limited apps and features. 
• Advertising. Include the ability to pay for ads for hotels that desire to be indexed higher when searching for a particular region. 
• Marketplace. You can charge hotels for lending on your site both one-time and in subscription format.

In addition, you may use any different monetization methods you know, and an experienced software provider will tell you how to implement them in your application.

 

Process of Developing a Booking App

Let's explore the process of designing a hotel booking application.

Steps of Creating a Hotel Booking App

1. Initial Contact. First, you communicate your idea to the supplier (software vendor) online. They process your project and contact you to confer details and terms of teamwork. 
2. Discovering. During this step, you and your team organize the information about the project. Business analysts refine the requirements, form a detailed picture of the task with a clear plan of creation, as well as supply a final assessment of the project. 
3. UI/UX Design. In the previous phase, designers created only wireframes. At this stage, they make the entire look of your future application screen by screen. After the design is created and approved, they hand the project to the developers. 
4. Development Process. In this phase, the project moves from sketches to the stage of a working application. Development takes place in several steps, during each of which the team fulfills specific goals. 
5. Quality Assurance. After the application is created, QA engineers run many tests, both manually and automatically. This allows developers to fix all the bugs so that the application works perfectly by release. 
6. Release. Eventually, after the final tests, the application is ready. Now it can be deployed for the targeted platforms. 
7. Maintaining. Collaboration doesn't necessarily end after the app is released. In the long run, you can work with the team to update the application and add new features.
   

 

Summarizing

Developing a hotel booking app could seem a rather complicated and time-consuming process. However, the project will bring many benefits with the proper approach and collaboration with experienced professionals.