In the current time, people want to take a short break after every specific period to get themselves refresh and free from the tedious and repetitive tasks of daily life. This short break can be anything such as sitting at home doing nothing or going somewhere on a trip with friends or family. While planning a trip, people want everything managed, right from booking the cab to roam around to booking the hotels at different places.
People prefer to use hotel booking apps like Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Expedia, etc. to assist them in booking a hotel, and hence, they can set the entire focus to make the trip mesmerizing. Searching and booking a hotel is the most crucial task to do, therefore hotel booking apps must provide more amenities to their users to make this process easier for them.
The growing interest of people in traveling is the reason behind the immense popularity of these travel & hotel booking apps. This sudden change in people’s interest has made entrepreneurs invest in the industry and get a Travel app development solution to enlarge their business. In the below guide, you will get to know about the Travel and hotel booking app development cost, along with the features and benefits. Let’s dig out more-
Table of Contents
Overview of Booking.com
Booking.com is one of the most popular hotel booking apps worldwide that provides services like hotel reservations and ticket booking for flights. It also provides users the facility of booking a taxi or car on rent to travel anywhere. Apps like Booking.com and others have made traveling and booking rooms much easier than before for people. Users just need to download the app and sign-up for it to make their bookings for a particular date.
It is known as the best marketplace so far that can be used by hotel owners as well to market and promote their services to customers worldwide. By using these travel and hotel booking applications, various hotels have become the best service providers across the world and gained a lot of profit.
Working of Travel & Hotel Booking Apps Like Booking.Com
Entrepreneurs need to know about the working of travel and hotel booking apps before getting hospitality app development services. To get details about ‘How does this app work’? Keep Scrolling-
1. Searching the Hotel
Users or travelers can find the nearby hotels to their destination by looking at affordable prices. This search is influenced through a metasearch engine that facilitates users to compare the price among available hotels via different OTAs (online travel agencies).
2. Different Room Categories
Each hotel has different rooms categories as an option for their guests. They can choose among them as per their budget. It is for their own convenience to get the amazing experience via selecting the categories like city side, seaside view, suite rooms, hilltop, etc.
3. Deciding the Cost
After selecting the room category, users can decide the amenities they want such as including breakfast, lunch, and dinner or not, bed size, laundries, gym, cab services, etc. on this behalf, their room price will be decided.
4. Final Booking
Travelers can book the hotel room by paying the complete cost of the room after ensuring all the things are acceptable. Later, they will get a confirmation mail including all the required details of hotel and room, on their registered number or Email ID.
5. Cancel Booking
This feature is provided by all the travel and hotel booking sites nowadays as customers can have some valid reason to cancel the booking at the end moment. This ‘cancel booking’ option comes with both non-refundable and completely refundable policies depending on what you chose while booking the hotel.
Market Statistics & Facts of Hotel Booking Industry
The travel and hotel booking industry has gained continuous growth with each passing year and now, it is known as the fastest rising sector worldwide. Some of the past years have been the golden years for the hotel industry excluding the COVID times, as the industry had exceptional growth in terms of revenue and customer base.
While talking about the market stats and growth of the travel & hotel industry, we have seen an upsurge constantly across the world. According to the reports, the market size of the hotel & resort industry across the globe has been reached $1.47 trillion in 2019. Due to the consequences of the COVID pandemic, the market size went down to $610 billion in 2020 but in the next year, it is forecasted to rise again to nearly $950 billion.
The below graph is representing the market growth of the industry with each passing year that will provide you a clear idea about the expansion of the sector.
Exploring more sectors such as travel, cab services, etc. along with hotel booking will benefit the industry in various ways and increase the customer base. The above stats clearly mentioned that the hotel booking industry is evolving at a fast rate and it is a perfect time to invest in the same.
Benefits Associated with the Hotel Booking Applications
Entrepreneurs prefer to have a hotel booking app like Booking.com because they know there are a lot of benefits included with it. Not only for entrepreneurs, but for customers, travel agents, hotels, and others, every person gets its benefits. Enterprise takes guidance from a hotel booking app development company so that they can have those benefits efficiently.
1. For Users
Users or customers are the main audiences that are the central focus of the businesses. Here are the benefits provided to them-
- Finding Multiple Hotels
- Make Secure & Easy Payment
- 24*7 Customer Services
- Booking Cancelling
- Checking Feedback and Review of the Hotels
2. For Hotels
Hotels are the one who manages the whole process of hotel booking and hence, generate sales at a high rate. Check out some of their benefits-
- Able to Open Business 24*7
- Improving the Reservations
- Get Quicker Payments by Users
- Flexible Working Timings
- Efficient Up-Sell Add-ons
- Calendar Management
- Valuable Business Insights
3. For Travel Agents
These custom mobile app solutions for hotel booking help travel agents as well. Apps like Booking.com facilitate travel agents about user engagement, new markets exploration, user data, and brand recognition.
Popular Hotel Booking Apps to Look At in 2021
There is various top hotel booking mobile applications and services that are serving the users regarding booking of hotels and travel packages. Entrepreneurs can also take suggestions from these established apps to develop the same app as them. Following are some of the best hotel booking applications desired by the users-
- Booking.com
- Expedia
- TripAdvisor
- Orbitz
- Priceline
- Hotels.com
Salient Features to Comprise in a Hotel Booking Mobile App
Features are the foundation of a mobile application that helps ventures to grab the audience’s attention and on which a business operates. Therefore, at the time of hotel reservation app development, it is necessary to include impressive features into the app to make it worthwhile. Have a look at below-
For Customers
We recommend that these below-mentioned features are worth being included in a travel and hotel booking app for users, check out them-
Sign-up and Login
Booking.com clone apps include only a simple registration process and users can sign-up via Google, Facebook, or any other social media app. Once they get registered, they can log in to the app anytime again. This option is convenient and delivers an amazing user experience.
Customer Profiles
Customers have this feature so that they can build their profile on the app to use all the available features. It involves the user’s name, profile picture, email ID, country name, etc. Customers can create a cart here to save their favorite hotel or resort to go there later.
User Dashboard
When users log in to the app, the dashboard will be visible to them, where they can get all the information such as bookings, wish lists, recommendations, reviews, and many more. Users can also modify their personal details via this.
Searching
It is the most important feature as users can search about the nearby hotels of their destinations. They can see which the best place is to stay as per the provided amenities and compared price. User’s review & feedback will help in this.
Location and Maps Addition
It identifies the user’s locations via the IP address of the device they are using. With this, users can also explore more places near their destination. Entrepreneurs prefer the map integration feature while having hotel booking website development services as this feature is more useful for websites to find the location of the hotel or some other place.
Feedback and Reviews
Feedbacks, ratings & reviews are very important for users as these provide them an idea about how good or bad a hotel is? These are also significant for marketing the services as most of the app users prefer these ratings and reviews by other customers.
Push Notifications
It is another great way of marketing. Hotel booking apps can send alerts or notifications to the users via SMS, Email, or in-app notifications. These notifications can be about anything such as service promotions, reminders, discounts, offers, or recommendations.
Booking and Cancellations
Booking and cancellation both are very easy with the hotel booking apps like Booking.com, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Priceline, Orbitz, etc. To the time, you have decided where you want to go or stay, you can book a hotel room by paying online and it is booked for you. Users also have time to cancel the booking within 24 hours of booking and get the full refund in some cases.
Taxi Booking
This is not a compulsory option to choose by users. It is their choice they want to take it or not? Travelers who go out of the city for fun and don’t know the routes of that place can book a taxi from the hotel to visit different places. The cab charges will be added to your hotel bill at the end.
Payment Services
After deciding about the hotel accommodations and services you want to take, you can pay to the hotel via selecting one way among different payment gateways that are secure and easy enough to use. These gateways are PayPal, online banking, e-wallet, credit, or debit card, etc.
For Hotel Owners
Like customers, hotel owners need to have some features as well. These added features help them to have control over the activities and business operations.
Booking Management
It is an important feature for service providers, they can manage all the bookings, whether it is online or offline. All are secured at one place; hence it provides potential customers the facility to self-book the room as per their availability on the date and pay via different channels.
Property Management
This feature helps to manage the day-to-day hotel activities and operations like housekeeping, front desk, reservations, maintenance, analytics, invoicing & billing, and reporting.
Advanced Features
Despite integrating the core features into the hotel reservation mobile app, ventures add some advanced features as well to provide their audiences something unique from others. Get to know about these features-
Recommendation Engine
Based on what users have searched in the past few days, the app suggests users offers provided by Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Priceline, etc. It works upon the data gathered from the user’s search helping the algorithm that turns out to have great outcomes.
Travel Cost Estimation
The cost of hotels and traveling vehicles such as buses, flights, trains, and others fluctuate depending on various factors, thus, it is difficult for users to calculate the final cost of their trip. This feature helps them by providing seasonal offers, discounts, and trends and assisting in booking rooms and flights at a reasonable rate.
Travel Guide
Customers need assistance at every step that’s why there are available assistances such as messenger, chatbots, Google Assistants, etc.
Virtual Tour
This feature provides users the facility to have a virtual feel to the hotel before going there. This virtual tour includes videos, photos, and 360 views. Businesses who want to develop an app like booking.com must include this feature in the app.
Language & Currency Converter
To promote the app worldwide, it is obvious that you must comprise multilingual support and currency converter so that no user would have any problem understanding the app or doing the payment. The app must work as per the user’s location.
Analytics Dashboard
Admin needs this feature to get through the hotel dashboard, flight dashboard, and customer dashboard to improve his decision-making. Businesses hire expert app developers to get the analytics dashboard as they offer low-priced bookings to customers when there is a low frequency in a specific season.
Integrated CRM
It is a prime feature to add to the booking system to provide customers with a home-like experience. Providing customers with all kinds of hospitality services is the main motive of the app development and CRM integration helps to do that.
Marketing Tools
Promotion and marketing tools play a crucial role to grab the audience’s attention and provide them with what they want. Every travel and tourism app development company must have this feature in their booking application as it provides services such as email marketing, chatbots, paid social media marketing, etc.
How Do Travel & Hotel Booking Apps Make Money?
There is a high demand for Booking.com app development services because of the different money-making ways provided by the app. Every business wants to have profit; hence they need to apply the most appropriate monetization strategy.
Following are some of the monetization models that can be perfect for a hotel booking app-
1. App Subscription
Apps like Booking.com offer users to buy app subscriptions to get permission to use more app features, interesting deals, and various discounts in the future. Users can also purchase premium app functionality. The app subscription model helps entrepreneurs to bear the cost to develop an app like Booking.com.
2. Advertising
Give a chance to other businesses as well to grow with you and display their ads on your hotel booking app. Those businesses will pay you for this and thus, you can earn lots of profit. Apps can charge an extra fee to businesses to display their ads on the top of the app.
3. Service Fee
Hotel booking apps are free to charge the fee for each booking made by the user via the app. For example- Airbnb applies commission from customers, on the other hand, Booking.com charges money from apartments and hotels booked by the app users.
4. Marketplace
Applications can earn through charging money from the hotels, or guest houses that want to be on the top of the list. It can be anyway, whether subscription or one-time payment. App owners can take the help of a custom mobile app development company to add productive monetization ways like the marketplace to the app.
Required Team Structure & Tech Stack
Having a professional and skilled team from a top travel and tourism app development company is like achieving a great milestone in the journey of creating a travel and hotel booking app. The team of experts will help you to integrate the right technology stack to make the app outstanding in every way.
1. Team Structure
Enterprises need to hire travel app developers & designers who have enough knowledge about all the latest technologies so that businesses don’t need to hire different developers for different purposes. Following is the ideal team structure for booking app development.
- Plan Manager
- Requirement Analyst
- Front-end Developer
- Back-end Developer
- Android & iOS Developers
- QA Engineers
2. Technology Stack
Integration of the latest technologies and tools can differ the cost to develop an app. On the other hand, an appropriate technology stack will make your app hold a strong position in the market. Have a look below-
- Push Notifications: Push.io, Twilio
- Payment Services: Braintree, PayPal, eWallets, Stripe
- Real-time Analytics: Cisco, BigData, Apache Flink, IBM, Hadoop, Spark
- Email– Mandrill
- Phone Verification, SMS, Voice: Nexmo, Twilio
- Storage and Caching with CDNs: Amazon S3
- HTTP & Proxy Server: Nginx
- Streaming Media System: Wowza Streaming Engine, Nimble Streamer, Helix Universal Server
- Aggregator APIs: Expedia Affiliate Network API, ZUMARA Hotel Booking API
- Maps: Google Maps
- Cloud Environment: AWS
How to Develop a Hotel Booking App?
Before going to develop a mobile app, enterprises must know about “How to create hotel booking app?” Having enough knowledge about the development process makes a lot of things easier for app owners in terms of cost and time. Check out the below points-
Step 1: Market Research & Analysis
At first, collecting all the required data and information will be beneficial to plan the whole process. Gather the essential tech requirements and articulate a detailed specification of the project. It will help the business analyst to make the final structure of the project and UI/UX designers can make the wireframes for every app screen through it.
Step 2: UI/UX App Design
App owners need to choose a travel app development company that has experienced UI/UX app designers. After getting all the wireframes, designers move to create mock-ups for the app. By combining all the wireframes, project needs, and latest UI/UX methods, a top-notch prototype can be created with a commercial style.
Step 3: App Development
The completion of the designing phase is the start of the development phase. It integrates the alteration of mock-ups into the working travel and hotel booking app. This phase includes coding or developing that can be divided into parts to make the work easier to complete by the team.
Step 4: Quality Testing
The development phase can have a lot of issues or bugs that can be removed via the testing phase. In this step, QA testers perform multiple tests to ensure the app is error-free and ready to launch. If the tests are completed without any bugs and meet all requirements & specifications, they will be launched. If there is any bug then first, developers will fix it.
Step 5: Launch & Maintenance
After the final polishing, the development team can launch the hotel booking app if it is working as expected and completely ready. The app will be released on the target markets to get positive outcomes.
The Cost Evaluation for Hotel Booking App Development
It is the main question asked by the app owners that how much does an app like Booking.com cost? To estimate the complete cost of developing a hotel booking mobile app for Android and iOS depends on various aspects such as application features, mobile platforms, technologies & tools, team structure, location & experience of the development company, etc. The total hours are taken in the entire development process also plays a crucial role in settling down the whole cost that is going to invest in the app.
Taking these all things into consideration, the cost to develop a hotel booking app like Booking.com would be around $5,000 to $15,000 along with basic features. If any app owner wants to add some advanced features, then the app development cost would go higher. There are also different charges applied by developers from different regions that can take the overall cost to the above level.
Final Words
The travel and hotel industry is evolving with each passing year and having a good revenue for the involved ventures. To be on the top among all the competitors in the sector, you have to be extra innovative and eye-catching. To get into the game, you must have a feature-packed hotel booking application. The whole process of hotel booking app development is a protracted procedure that asks for the dedicated participation of a skilled team of designers & developers.
Hiring a leading mobile app development company will help you in every possible way in the development process. At SemiDot Infotech, we provide travel and hotel booking app development services by our skilled professionals who have been in the industry for years and know every bit of it. Our team will build software for you that helps your business to manage the operations using several criteria such as availability, affordability, hospitality, etc. Join us and feel relaxed about everything.
