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:

The revenue in the Hotels segment grows by 4% per year and is about to reach $432 million in 2023. Moreover, a big part of this revenue comes from online sources:

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).

However, after scrolling through the first results users usually want to narrow them down even more. That’s why you need to build a hotel booking app with a few extra features to improve the search process.

First of all, these are filters and sorting features. Despite they may sound pretty similar there are some differences between them.

✅ Filters

People use Filters for even deeper search by setting more specific parameters. Eventually, only the results that match these parameters will be shown.

In terms of hotel app development, it may relate to a bunch of items like:

• daily (per night) or overall budget;
• star rating;
• review score;
• hotel and room facilities;
• district;
• distance from the city center;
• meals.

Of course, the list above isn’t exhaustive and may include other items you need.

⬇️ Sorting

Another great tool to tailor search results is the Sorting feature. It doesn’t exclude any hotels from the results screen. Yet, it changes the order in which they are shown.

So what sorting options to include when you make a hotel booking app? The most popular ones are:

• price from the lowest to the highest — definitely a must-have for mobile apps for a hotel industry;
• popularity;
• hotels with the best review score first;
• distance from the city center.

Just like in the previous paragraph, the list can be different depending on your needs.

🗺 In-App Map

Finally, the last feature to improve the searching functionality is In-App Map. Despite many users really like it and find it useful, it may not match the initial MVP Scope and be implemented during further iterations.

It will require Google Maps integration or any other map service but Google Maps are usually considered as the best option. It will allow users to look for places to stay right on the map.

The feature will be very useful for travelers who want to stay near certain places or in certain areas.

Feature Block # 2: Getting Detailed Info 📄

When scrolling through the results list users usually pay attention to the price, review score, cover photo and, sometimes, distance from the city center.

However, usually it’s not enough to make the final decision. That’s why you need a Hotel Details Screen as one of the key hotel mobile app features.

What do your users expect to see there? If we put it like a scheme, it would look as follows:

However, the scheme above may be different as you make a hotel booking app for your own Startup. Eventually, it may be more reasonable for you to change the order of items on the screen, remove some of them (for example, the interactive map may not match the MVP Scope) or add new ones.

Yet, the one thing you’ll need for sure is detailed info about available rooms. They require special attention as it’s the last step before the checkout.

📃 Detailed Room Info

These are the screens that provide users with a full description of the chosen accommodation option.

On the previous, Detailed Hotel Info screen we’d recommend either placing a button to open a separate Room Details Screen or providing just a short description of available rooms. From the tech perspective, it may be implemented as a carousel.

So what are the key elements of this screen? Actually, it looks somewhat similar to the Hotel screen but includes less info:

Also, not only UX but the UI Design matters a lot. Here are a few general tips that you may use during hotel booking app development:

• Always keep your CTA button visible. Make it contrast with the background. And lock the button on the screen so users can always see and easily reach it.
• Make it easy to navigate. As you could see, both Hotel and Room Details Screens are quite informative. That’s why using different formatting tools — like bold, italic, different text colors, icons, etc. — will help to structure this data and help users find what they were looking for.

Feature Block # 3: Handling Payments 💸

When a user finds a suitable accommodation option, he moves to the last stage of his journey in your hotel booking app. However, if the checkout process isn’t user-friendly you may face high abandonment rates.

That’s why this block of features also requires special attention as you create a hotel booking app.

💳 Checkout

The common rule for the Checkout process in any app is the same: make it fast and easy. Yet, it can’t be too short since hotel booking requires providing some personal information.

Usually, the Checkout process is divided into 2 steps:

• filling personal info;
• overview and confirmation.

The minimum scope of required user’s info includes first and last name, email address, mobile phone number and country.

On the Overview Screen, users should be able to check again the following information:

• The name of the property.
• Check-in and check-out time and dates.
• A total number of nights and people in this booking.
• Room type.
• Total price including all taxes and charges.
• Another important information like free cancelation options.

Most likely, you’ll also need to integrate online payments as you develop a hotel booking app.

🏦 Payment Gateway

To put it short, Payment Gateway is a technology used for handling online payments on your website or in your mobile application.

So as not to go deep into technical details, you just need to pick the most suitable provider from the business perspective and your Dev Team will do the rest.

Despite they all offer quite similar terms, we recommend paying attention to pricing, payout time, supported payment methods and currencies.

Luckily, we have a comprehensive guide on how to choose and integrate a mobile payment gateway. There we compare 8 the most popular services and provide some useful tips so check it out!

Feature Block # 4: Personal Profiles 👤

Profiles are the last set of hotel mobile app features we would like to highlight in this article. Why do they matter?

• Link personal data to a particular user. Thus, they can go through the checkout process having their personal info autocompleted. It also allows linking social media accounts and credit card details.
• Set up and save private settings. This may relate to language, currency, newsletter preferences, etc.
• Get personalized discounts. Many mobile apps for a hotel industry have their own discount programs like Booking.com’s Genius or Hotels.comRewards based on user’s activity in the app.
• Store personal data. This relates to bookmarks, past and ongoing bookings, left reviews and so on.

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!

👛 How Much Does it Cost to Build a Hotel Booking App?

You, guys, could already get used that we provide you with an estimate of both BackEnd and FrontEnd parts. This time we decided to omit the BackEnd part since it may significantly change depending on the concept you choose.

Therefore, today we are going to pay more attention to the FrontEnd part, or, in short, iOS and Android versions of a hotel booking application.

*common tasks include: project setup; repository setup; architecture setup; libraries integration; local database setup; local models creation; cache configuration; authentication setup; navigation setup.

Note: we took an average rate of $40/hour but it depends on many different factors so don't think of it as the final price.

Don’t forget that all of the above is only a rough estimate of the mobile apps without the BackEnd part. If you have an idea for a hotel booking Startup feel free to share it with us and we will provide you with a more detailed and accurate estimate!

🔎 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.

Hotellook: perfect in its simplicity

According to Google Play Market, this app was downloaded over 1 million times. And we understand why!

Hotellook is an aggregator app that cooperates with 80+ online booking systems and covers more than 760,000 hotels in 205 countries. The app can either suggest you located nearby variants of accommodation for a fast reservation or provide you with a detailed info about hotels around the globe for beforehand booking.

Among noteworthy basic features (that you can take into consideration during your hotel app development) there are:

• A flexible filter system that allows you to sort results by price, rating, distance to any point (you can set it on your own), meal types, room/hotel amenities.
• A detailed description of hotels that includes bright high-quality photos, user reviews and, most importantly, a pricing block with several offers from different booking systems to compare.

Hotels.com: 3 creative ways to attract users

Another successful competitor on the market is Hotels.com. As Google Play Market reports, the app has over 10 million downloads.

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.

Such apps can be used for many purposes. The most obvious ones are room booking and ordering extra services. However, the mobile app’s possibilities aren’t limited to these options only.

For example, in many mobile apps for hotel chains users can find features like quick check-in, digital room key, TV remote control, adjust room temperature and others.

# 2: Increase Revenue 💰

A branded mobile app for a hotel chain can become a powerful profit booster, too. There are a few ways:

1. Direct room booking in the app. You can generate revenue from bookings made via your app. Direct bookings mean the ability to set higher rates, avoid OTA commissions and don’t fall under their rules.
2. Upsell services. Using push notifications and in-app messages you can encourage users to book extra services like dining, airport transfer, grocery delivery, laundry, spa, and others.
3. Personalized approach. Finally, you can make more money by just taking a more personalized and proactive approach to your guests. Special deals based on users’ interests and behavior can help to increase booking conversions.

# 3: Boost Brand Loyalty ❤️

Mobile apps are well-known tools for building and boosting brand loyalty.

With special deals, promotions and loyalty programs you’ll be able to keep in touch with your guests long after they check-out. And it means higher chances for them to book again and turn into your repeat customers. After all, retaining an existing customer is always cheaper than acquiring a new one, right?

The most popular mechanism for maintaining brand loyalty is loyalty programs. Guests usually get points based on the number of nights they have stayed. Then they can either exchange these points for some extra services or nights (just like your own in-app currency) or get a special tier that provides them with exclusive benefits.

For example, the Marriott hotel chain has a 6-level loyalty membership system. It’s based on a number of nights per year and provides a wide range of benefits: free late check-out, welcome gifts, room upgrades, special member rates, etc.

Moreover, apps can boost your guests’ loyalty through in-app support and feedback services. It helps to deal with any problems before, during and after a stay to prevent potential negative reviews and ensure customer satisfaction.

Finally, your logo will always stay in sight of your users as long as they keep your app installed.

# 4: Analytics 📊

Another reason to develop a branded application for a hotel chain is that it can be a great tool to provide you with valuable insights. How often your guests use the app during the stay, how much they spend, how they use hotel services and so on.

Moreover, you can go even further and analyze the behaviour of your users even outside the application. By implementing the Social Login feature you’ll allow users to sign up in your app using their existing social media profiles - Facebook, for example. With the help of third-party services, you can get a better understanding of your customers’ interests, preferences and behavior patterns.

Eventually, you can reuse all the collected information to personalize your interaction with every specific customer and adjust your overall strategy for better performance.

# 5: Improved Staff Efficiency 👩‍💼

Let’s not forget that a hotel app for a hotel chain can also be considered as an automation solution. Thus, it helps to cut costs, save time and help your staff work even more efficiently.

It’s quite easy to track peak demand for services with the app. Using this information, your management can easily streamline operations and coordinate staff accordingly.

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?

The Search feature consists of the Search itself as well as a few extra features that are vital for good UX (User Experience). So don’t underestimate their importance when you will create a branded hotel application.

The basic info users have to enter is no different from the one you ask on your website:

• city or the name of the specific hotel;
• check-in and check-out dates;
• number of rooms;
• number of adults and children;
• any other special parameters (like wheelchair-accessible rooms or rooms with special rates).

What are the extra features to enhance the searching process?

↕️ Sorting

The Sorting feature shapes the search results in a specific order. Existing hotel chain applications offer their users to sort results by price (low to high and vice versa), ratings, distance to the city center, distance from local attractions and hotel brand.

Yet, the feature is the most useful if you have several hotels in the same cities. However, you may not implement it if there are no more than 3-5 hotels of your brand in any of the cities as it won’t have much sense.

✅ Filtering

Another basic search results shaping tool is the Filtering feature. It allows hiding hotels from the search results that don’t match specific preferences set by the users.

Again, based on what your competitors do, the list of preferences may include:

• Hotel brand.
• Available amenities.
• Daily budget.
• District.
• Review score.

The list above is not exhaustive so you may add any other parameters that seem important to you.

🗺 Map

Finally, your competitors also offer their users the In-App Map feature at the search stage. How does it work?

It just switches the view mode from the list to the map. Usually, developers integrate Google Maps right in your app, placing your hotel on it. Thus, your users are able to choose the hotel by visually estimating its location.

So after adjusting the Search feature and looking through possible options, your users will probably like to learn more about specific hotels. That’s how they end up on the next screen.

# 3: Hotel Details Screen 🏨

A great Hotel Details Screen increase chances to convert the user and turn him into your guest.

The implementation of this screen is different from app to app. In the Hyatt app, all the info is located on the same screen. In the Marriott app, users see just some basic info (name, review score, location) and for more details they should move to other separate screens. Thus, it’s up to you how exactly it will look.

However, there is a list of items that we would recommend to include. If we visually organize it as a screen scheme, it will look as follows:

As always, the list above can be supplemented with your own items. For example, you may also add:

• Transportation options to/from airports, main train and bus stations.
• Dining options if there are a few bars and restaurants in your hotel’s territory.
• Area attractions nearby your hotel. May include places for shopping, sports and recreation, sightseeing, nightlife, etc.
• In-app map on which users can see where exactly the hotel is located.
• Hotel map will be especially relevant for resort and ski hotels. It will help your guests not to get lost among all the swimming pools, hotel buildings, restaurants, skiing tracks and other facilities.
• Working hours will also be relevant for hotels with many facilities (swimming pools, skiing tracks, beach bars, etc.) that all close and open at different times.

If guests like the hotel, they would definitely like to get more info on available rooms before booking. That’s why they also need a detailed info screen.

# 4: Room Details Screen 🛏

This is another must-have screen in your branded application for a hotel chain. The Room Details Screen looks somewhat similar to the Hotel Details Screen but usually includes less info:

• Room type.
• Total price | Rate per 1 night.
• Short general description of the room.
• Available amenities.
• Room photos.

We also recommend paying attention to your CTA button. As you create a hotel booking app for a hotel chain, make sure that the button is clearly visible, of a different color compared to the background and has a fixed position so it doesn’t hide even when users scroll the screen.

# 5: Payment Flow 💸

Eventually, if a user likes both the hotel and the room, he moves to the payment stage. It can be divided into 2 steps:

1. Checkout.
2. Payment handling.

At the Checkout stage users are asked to provide (if they haven’t signed up before) or confirm their personal details - name and surname, address, phone number, payment details.

To process in-app payments you’ll need a Payment Gateway. This is a technology that enables online payments via mobile applications or websites.

Since it’s more of a tech topic, the implementation of a payment gateway will be on your Dev Partner.

All you need to do is to pick the most suitable service provider. Despite they all offer pretty similar terms, we recommend checking the article below for a better understanding:

There we compare 8 the most popular services and provide some useful tips so check it out!

# 6: Services 🍾

Providing access to extra services as you develop an application for a hotel chain is a win-win situation for both you and your guests. They get improved CX while you’re able to upsell services and increase your revenue.

What in-app services can you include in your application?

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!

**

**

💡 Takeaways

We hope this guide makes the hotel booking app development process clear for you, no matter whether you're a Startup Team or part of a Hotel Chain Team.

Let’s sum up 3 key steps you should take to build a hotel application:

Looking for a Reliable Tech Partner to deliver a great Mobile App for you? Drop us a line and we’ll answer all your questions or help you with the Development!