Hotel App Development: Guide for Hotel Chains and Hotel Booking Startups

The Travel industry is on the rise. People move closer to the beaches and pools in summer, visit mountains and holiday fairs in winter, and go sightseeing all year round. Add business trips, conferences, and other events to this list and you’ll be hardly able to find a person that spent the whole year without leaving the hometown.

That’s why the Online Hotel Booking industry is on the rise, too. This brings many new players to the market.

On the one hand, you have innovation-driven Startup Teams that make hotel booking simpler, faster and cheaper. On the other hand, hotel owners don’t want to stay behind and also try to improve their services by putting them in the digital form.

In this guide, we’ll explain how you can build a hotel booking app or a branded application for your hotel or hotel chain.

Let’s start with hotel booking app development for Startups. However, if you’re interested in developing a branded app for your hotel or hotel chain, you can jump right to this part!

🏨 Why Build a Hotel Booking App like Booking.com or Hotels.com?

More and more Startups turn to hotel app development as they discover its perspectives. Jersey Island Holidays reports that:

• by 2023 there will be 700 million people booking their hotel stays online;
• every second (57%) hotel booking is now made online;
• from 28% to 53% of travelers depending on the region book hotels via mobile devices.

The growing number of cool mobile apps for hotel industry can be also explained by the remarkable stats below:

As you can see, the share of online revenue continuously grows and is about to reach 75% soon. How can you make the most out of this tendency? Create a hotel booking app!

It’s important to decide on the type and business model of your application before you start the development itself. What’s the proven way? Startups usually enter this market by developing a hotel booking aggregator application. Think of Booking.com, Hotels.com or Hostelworld — that will be it!

In the next paragraph, we’ll review key features you’ll need to build a hotel booking app MVP. Let’s take a look!

⚙️ Hotel Mobile App Features: What to Include

Basically, hotel booking aggregator apps are built around a few patterns that define key features for your future app. Here’s what it all is about:

• Searching. Users should be able to look for hotels using a set of parameters to narrow down search results.
• Detailed info. To make a decision people should be able to access detailed info about hotels like photos, available room types, facilities, location, etc.
• Direct booking. Finally, direct bookings and in-app payments are other things users expect to see in your application.

Let’s take a closer look at these patterns. Moreover, to prepare this hotel booking app MVP development guide we broke them down into specific features!

Feature Block # 1: Search 🔍

Search and all the related features are the backbone of your application. Actually, these are a few features that are going to be used by every user. That’s why the search process should be as fast, easy and user-friendly as possible.

Commonly, to use the Search feature itself users should specify 3 parameters at the first setout:

• location — a city they are going to visit;
• date — arrival and departure dates;
• quantitative parameters — the number of required rooms and the number of people (usually divided into adults/children categories).

Moreover, it should be fast and easy to create a profile. In other words, make your Sign Up process user-friendly. This will require the implementation of Social Login feature using APIs of popular social networks.

What are the other tools to help you during the hotel booking app development? Let’s check them!

🛠️ How to Make a Hotel Reservation App: Tech Tips

As always, we are going to provide you with a number of tech tips. These are development tools that will help you to make a hotel booking app really user-friendly and save you time and money in some parts. Take a look:

1. To fill your app with accommodation offers you can use ZUMATA Hotel Booking API or Expedia Affiliate Network API.
2. Olery Hotel Review Data API and TripAdvisor Content API provide access to ratings and reviews.
3. Google Places API is used to add information about stores, cafeterias and other important places that are sometimes necessary for the user to choose a hotel.
4. izi.TRAVEL offers another API that may come in handy. It enriches the app with city guides and stories along the routes.
5. As always, we recommend you to use Braintree or Stripe for handling in-app payments.
6. Google Maps API is the easiest way to integrate a map into your app.
7. Finally, to implement the Social Login feature you can use Twitter’s, Facebook’s or Instagram’s APIs.

However, you are still likely to need a reliable Tech Partner — a hotel booking app development company — to go through the development process. How much can such services cost? Our developers have made an estimate for you, check it out!

🔎 Case Study: Hotellook, Hotels.com

We’ve learned enough theory so now we can move to practice. Let’s take a look at two successful hotel reservation apps and find out how they have implemented some of the mentioned above features.

Hotels.com is quite different from the Hotellook app. It doesn’t redirect you to online booking services and allows to make all the payments right in the app. However, it’s worthy of note for a number of special features that may be useful when you decide to build a hotel booking app:

• For every 10 nights in hotels booked with this app, you will get 1 free night in any available hotel.
• Hotels.com app has an in-app map with famous sightseeings of the city you visit marked on it.
• You can also save up to 50% using Secret Prices that available only in the mobile app.

However, if you’re interested in developing a mobile application for your hotel chain, the next part is just for you!

👍 Top 5 Reasons Why Your Hotel Chain Needs a Mobile App

The world has gone mobile now. So should the hospitality industry. Here are a few obvious benefits of creating a branded hotel application for your business.

# 1: Improve CX — Customer Experience 🕺

Hotel business, just like any other business, is about customers. And if you can significantly improve their experience why not do so?

Branded hotel applications help to establish a direct connection with your guests. In practice, it means that have all the services right in their pockets.

In the era of tech-savvy guests, quick access to information and immediate response to any requests is a must. And the easiest way to provide such a high level of service quality is by developing a concierge hotel application.

Moreover, lots of questions can be resolved via the app so your guests don’t have to call or form lines at the front desk. This keeps your staff less busy and allows focusing on really important rather than operational tasks.

Also, services digitalization usually results in a reduction of paper usage, saving you some money and helping your brand stick to modern eco-friendly guidelines.

However, to develop a mobile application for a hotel chain you’ll first have to define a list of key features. Luckily, we have one for you. Check it out below!

📱 Top Features for Hotel Chain App Development

So as not to spend much time on obvious things let’s just say that hotel bookings applications like Booking.com and branded apps for hotel chains are two absolutely different stories. That’s why we prepared a separate feature list to create a branded hotel application.

The structure below is based on our own experience and case study researches of hotel chain apps by Marriott, Ritz Carlton, Hyatt, Radisson, and a few others.

# 1: Sign Up 🔐

Sign Up is quite an important feature for hotel apps. It helps to establish personal contact with each user, link data to a particular person and more effectively use retargeting and marketing tools.

That’s why many in many hotel apps this step is mandatory. Users can’t proceed to room booking until they sign up. However, this may scare off some of your potential guests. What’s to be done?

• If you also want to create a hotel booking app with a mandatory Sign Up, we strongly recommend implementing a Social Login feature. It allows signing up with just a few taps by reusing data from social media profiles. Not only it makes the whole process faster, easier and more convenient to the user but also links every specific user with their social media accounts, opening your way to more data for analysis.
• Alternatively, you may let users skip the Sign Up step at first. However, you will still have to ask them to create a profile at the checkout stage or when they want to access some of the hotel services.

After completing or skipping this step, uses on the Search or Home Screen.

# 2: Search Flow 🔍

The search flow should be absolutely flawless in your app. If it’s too slow, complicated or buggy, users won’t book a stay. And thus all other features will be useless, too.

But before we review the Search flow itself, let’s make a little stop.

The Search feature is usually located on the Home Screen. What can you place here except for the Search box? Let’s check the experience of the others?

So as these features don’t get lost somewhere in the app we recommend dedicating a separate screen for them that can be accessed through the tab bar.

# 7: Personal Profiles 👤

Finally, the last set of features to build a branded hotel application are the features related to users’ Personal Profiles. Why is it important?

• Link the user and his data. Once signed up, your guests can easily reuse their data at the checkout stage or when ordering extra services during the stay.
• Store personal data. Bookmarks; past, ongoing and future stays; reviews; current loyalty program progress, etc.
• Highlight promotions & special offers. This may also include personal promotions based on guest’s interests and behavior.
• Keep track of loyalty programs. Loyalty programs are one of the key reasons why people use branded hotel chain apps at all.
• Access member support. Finally, leave a few different channels (email, phone number, social media profiles) for your guests to get in contact if they need it.
• Send personalized Push Notifications. To retarget users and establish a stronger connection with them.

What technical tools will help you to develop a hotel application for a hotel chain? Check them out below!

🛠 Tech Stack to Develop a Branded App for a Hotel Chain

These are the tools that will make your hotel app development easier, faster or possible at all. Feel free to share this list with your Tech Partner!

• The group of products by Cendyn will help you to deal with marketing and sales tasks.
• StayNTouch solutions help to deal with staff onboarding, cross-department communication, mobile check-ins, check-outs, and a bunch of other tasks.
• To integrate in-app map services we recommend using Google Maps API.
• The Social Login feature can be implemented with the help of APIs by Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
• To process in-app payments, you can use Braintree, Stripe or another provider mentioned in this article.
• You can also integrate reviews about your hotels from other services using TripAdvisor Content API or Olery Hotel Review Data API.

🎁 Bonus

Remember the bonus we told about at the very beginning of the article?

Here is a clickable prototype of the booking app developed here in the Stormotion HQ.

Feel free to discover the screens and use it as a basis for your hotel booking startup!

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