How to Develop a Hotel Booking App? Types, Features, and Cost Estimations

We are all familiar with these brands and cannot underestimate the achievements of major firms in the e-travel sector, such as Airbnb, Booking.com, etc. These companies have contributed significantly to the travel sector’s rapid expansion by utilizing novel business models and cutting-edge technology.

Not even the coronavirus could stop this boom. Statista projects that the travel and tourism industry is expected to generate $716.80 billion in revenue in 2022. The market’s largest category is hotels, which is expected to generate $348 billion in 2022.

Another point to mention here is that mobile applications play a critical role in the rapid transformation of the online world that is currently taking place to provide hassle-free service delivery to anyone and everyone.

The above-mentioned statistics and the rapid digital transformation taking place in every industry make it clear why creating a hotel booking mobile app is essential to taking advantage of the numerous opportunities in the travel and tourism industry.

Many specialists in the hospitality sector are eager to develop an app for on-demand hotel booking. In addition, many new businesses are also entering the competition.

This blog is for you if you want to use a highly effective app to enter the hotel industry. It will assist you in learning the procedure and various facets of hotel booking app development. You will also learn about the key features and various types of hotel app development.

The Advantages of a Hotel Booking App

Advantages for hoteliers:

• The ability to regularly locate guests is one of the main advantages of booking apps for hotels. Smaller hotels that generally only open during the busiest times of the year can nonetheless draw guests all year long.
• Automated cost estimations for lodging and supplementary room service are established through a hotel booking app, considerably reducing the chances of errors.
• By guaranteeing a positive user experience, a hotel booking app enables hotel owners to explore new markets, draw clients, meet users, and promote their hotel brand. This makes the check-in and check-out procedures easier for guests, which makes them more likely to stay at your hotel again and refer it to others.

(Also read: How to Build a Custom Hotel Management Software: Key Features and Cost Considerations)

Advantages for users:

• Users of a hotel booking app may find all the available hotels under one roof.
• Users may easily choose the appropriate hotel based on factors like geography, pricing, facilities, and check-in and check-out timings.
• Users of hotel booking applications can evaluate hotels using hotel information and room photos.
• Users of a hotel reservation app may have a variety of payment methods to choose from, including debit cards, credit cards, bank transfers, in-app payments, online banking, and even cash payment during check-in.

Types of Hotel Booking Apps

Knowing which type of online hotel booking application you should build is necessary if you want to make a hotel booking app. You must have a distinct idea of what you can offer consumers and what hotel booking app features you would like to include in your app.

Some of the basic categories of hotel booking apps are:

Hotel Consolidator App

The primary goal of such apps is to gather hotel information and make it accessible to users. Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, etc., are a few examples.

Mobile Apps for Hotel Chains

A certain hotel or chain of hotels is the focus of this type of booking app, which exclusively allows for room bookings within that chain of hotels. Hilton Honors and Marriott Gold are two such examples.

Apps for Last-Minute Hotel Booking

This type of app is ideal for you if any of your consumers are trying to make a last-minute reservation. Users who make last-minute travel plans will have a booking facility, thanks to these types of apps for hotel booking.

Apps for Hotel Booking in Advance

You can reserve a room using this type of hotel booking app up to a year in advance. Many hotel booking apps, including Priceline and Expedia, adhere to this traditional hotel booking format.

Hybrid Hotel booking App

This type of app allows users to book in advance as well as on short notice through their mobile apps for hotels. As a result, the design is more of a hybrid one that combines the advantages of the two types of users.

Hotel Booking App Development Process

Before starting with the hotel booking app development, it is important to follow a checklist of steps involved in developing a hotel booking app MVP or minimum viable product. You will never miss out on any crucial aspect of the whole planning process if you follow all these steps, starting from market analysis to gathering user feedback and updating the app as per the feedback.

• Analyze the online travel market
• Create your competitor list
• Finalize the app distribution area
• Define your unique value proposition
• Shortlist the features for MVP
• Outsource the project to an experienced app development company like Appinventiv
• Stay updated on the app development process based on objectives and expectations
• Stay involved in the development process from start to finish
• Conduct regular meetings with the development team to ensure that the team is driving the right company vision
• Formulate the marketing strategy
• Launch your app to your target audience
• Collect customer feedback, revisit, scale, and introduce new features.

The above-mentioned outline of the steps to follow will provide you with a specific path. The MVP created through these steps can be taken to the next phase to further add and enhance the incorporated features.

Now, there are two approaches to hotel booking app development – template-based ready-to-use software and custom software.

For the quick launch of a hotel booking app, a simple approach to ready-to-use software can come in handy. However, a common problem with using ready-to-use solutions includes a possibility that your competitors are using the same template as you, which means you don’t have any unique proposition that using a custom design affords you.

Also, many times you end up paying for features that you actually don’t need for your business. Or, on the contrary, you end up spending money on the extra features that you actually require for scaling up your business. A custom hotel booking app saves you from all such issues as you get the app created as per your exact business requirements.

Steps to Develop a Custom Hotel Booking App

Let us now understand the complete development process for a custom hotel booking app in detail.

Gathering project details

The first step would be to gather and organize the project details. Gather the tech requirements to formulate a development plan with clear specifications. UI/UX makes the wireframe for every screen.

UI/UX design

Based on the wireframes, the UI/UX design team creates the prototype for every screen that is based on the specifications and development vision.

Development process

At this stage, the prototype screen is developed into a working app as per specifications. At Appinventiv, every development stage is divided into sprints that include coding, testing, and deployment stages.

Quality assurance

Now is the time to test the developed product. The responsibility lies with the QA engineer. The bug report is generated based on the test and is sent back to the development team to fix the bugs.

Product release

Final products are released after fixing the bugs and providing the final touches. The app is all set to get launched in the market. Post-launch, the team take feedback and improvizes the product based on it.

App support

Maintenance and updation is a regular process for regular improvisation of the final product.

Although the steps mentioned above sound simple but are laborious and time-consuming. It is important that the dedicated resources participate and collaborate to develop a successful custom hotel booking development application.

Must-Have Features of a Hotel Booking App

The building blocks of a hotel app development process are the features. The right features in a booking application make it simple to use and guarantee a trustworthy brand image.

So, here is a list of features that can help your app become well-liked by travelers.

A search option

Users can find precise information about the hotel and its amenities using the search tool. Your application’s core functions revolve around search and its related capabilities. In fact, this feature will be used by all the hotel app users. So make sure the search process is designed to be as quick, simple, and user-friendly as possible.

According to Statista, search is the main reason individuals use a travel mobile application.

Hotel information

Travelers require a close-up view of the hotel and its rooms before making a booking. A description, some photos, reviews, social media links, etc., should all be included in the app. Hotel suites, hallways, and other spaces can be shown off dynamically in immersive movies and visualizations with 360-degree images.

Filters

Allow users to filter the results based on their specific requirements. Users may choose to enter the desired price range or rating range. You can display all offers with this sorting, but the order in which they appear on the screen is altered. Users might, for instance, wish to view hotels with the best reviews or the cheapest rooms first.

Customer Service (Chatbot)

By enabling a chatbot in your app, you can assure your customers that you are always there to assist them. The Chatbot lets the user connect with customer support if they run into any problems. The customer service resolves the issue and provides the consumer with a wonderful user experience.

Push alerts and notifications

Travelers demand a quick response from the booking app, particularly while using last-minute booking services. Your hotel booking app development should provide a real-time alert system for hotels and visitors. In addition to booking verification, the app may notify users of check-in and check-out timings, rate changes, interruptions, etc. It might promote certain offers, deals, and packages at the hotel’s restaurant and remind visitors about planned activities and future events while they are there.

Reliable in-app payments

Mobile devices have sped up and simplified the payment process for those looking for a range of payment gateways. Make sure your hotel reservation app is connected to a reliable payment gateway. Instant payments will be made possible, and confidential user credit or debit card details will be protected. With the payment information entered only once and saved in the app, face id or touch id would make successive bookings quick and secure. Additionally, customers should have no trouble applying their rewards, coupons, bonuses, and promotional offers.

A forecast of travel and accommodation costs

We can not guarantee the cost of travel and accommodation because they keep changing. Making an algorithm that takes into consideration seasonal fluctuations, demand & growth, offers & discounts, and airline deals is no longer a challenge, thanks to a wealth of historical data. Your app can employ predictive analytics to assist consumers in finding lower-cost flights and hotel accommodations.

Payment receipt

The user will need confirmation after making the booking. The consumer can keep track of their booking details by having an automatically generated receipt emailed to them through email or mobile phone.

Car/taxi reservation service

Users need not utilize a separate taxi booking app because of this feature in your app. Using the apps for hotel booking, the traveler can request a taxi by providing the pick-up and drop-off locations. The request will be accepted if a driver is available at the nearby pick up location, and the user will receive confirmation.

Cancellation policy

Customers are protected by the cancellation policy during bookings. They will be able to cancel their bookings in case of an emergency. People might not like your hotel booking app if you don’t have a cancellation policy because they might think it’s restrictive. Your cancellation policy ought to be flexible. You should also include a refund policy in case any bookings are canceled.

Automatic language recognition and currency conversion

Your hotel booking app development should include an automatic language identification system if you have a worldwide audience. It facilitates providing the customer with a more individualized experience. If a user logs into your app from Spain, a pop-up message stating “This app is in English. Would you like to switch to Spanish?’’ should appear on the screen.

Along with automatic language detection, currency exchange is another useful feature. It lessens half the load tourists have while traveling to a different country.

Cost Estimates for Developing a Hotel Booking App

The cost of a hotel app development depends on several variables, including:

• Booking app type
• The number of required features
• The project’s complexity
• Operating system, which may be iOS or Android or both
• Approach to developing the mobile app (native or cross-platform)
• Necessary technologies (languages, libraries, frameworks, AI, VR, etc.).
• Team structure
• The deployment and support costs.

The number of professionals you require, which may differ depending on the application type, the number of features, and the project’s complexity, must also be considered when estimating the overall hotel booking app development cost.

It is very challenging to provide a precise cost for creating an app. However, it can be generally estimated that the price will range from $20k to $40k. However, it also depends on the number of man-hours required to create the app. Mentioned below are approximate hourly charges asked by developers in the regions mentioned along

Considering the basic hotel booking app features mentioned above, developing the MVP will require 3 to 4 months of effort and cost of at least $20,000. Depending on the technology selected for the hotel mobile app development, it might be a little bit more or less.

If you want to launch a full-featured hotel booking software with sophisticated features, bear in mind that it will cost at least US $25,000 and take between 7 and 9 months to develop.

How to Monetize a Hotel Booking App?

Let us get straight to the point – how to make money from the app? There is a lot of effort gone into conceptualizing, strategizing, and creating the app. It makes complete sense to earn from it. Let us dig into the monetizing strategy.

• Service Fees – Whenever a booking is made through the app, a service fee can be levied on it. Most travel sites charge service fees such as Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, and more.
• Marketplace – You can charge fees from the hotels that want to get listed on your app.
• Advertising – This is the most commonly used method. Hotels can pay to advertise on your site so that they can get a place among the top ranks in search results.
• Subscription – By offering subscriptions, you can offer extra features, better deals and discounts to your subscribers.

Build a Robust Hotel Booking App with Appinventiv

The most recent standards in the tourism and hospitality sectors are, without a doubt, those of the Internet and mobile phones. And several technological developments are changing the industry. It’s crucial to entrust your hotel booking app development to experienced hands.

Appinventiv excels at creating hotel booking applications that include every feature you can imagine. It’s our duty to satisfy our users as the leading travel app development company.

For instance, we created a successful hotel booking application Empire App, where the complete hotel booking ecosystem was empowered by combining the power of Crypto with the hotel benefiting the complete industry.

We can assist you in developing a successful hotel booking app, which needs a lot of work and skilled experts. With our experience and expertise and your ideas, we can take your hotel business to new heights.

Wrapping up!

The prevalence of mobile devices gives hospitality organizations exceptional chances to connect with and service clients at every stage of their journey. Through the use of hotel booking apps, you will be able to expand your business and draw in more customers who prefer not to waste their valuable time making bookings the old-fashioned way.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article and that it has given you more knowledge about how to create a booking app.

FAQs

Q. How do you create a hotel booking app?

A. The steps involved in creating a hotel booking app are:

• Analyze the market.
• Select the type of hotel booking app.
• Analyze the competition.
• Select the required hotel booking app features.
• Build a development team.
• Launch
• Gather feedback and update.

Q. How much does it cost to build a hotel booking app?

A. The hotel booking app development cost depends on a variety of elements, including the complexity of the app, the development model, third-party integrations, and the features that must be included at the UI/UX level. You can leave a quote request at the access point of the chosen vendor to learn more about the costs associated with developing a hotel booking app.

Q. Can I decide the features I wish to add to my app?

A. Yes, you may completely personalize the construction of your hotel booking app based on your needs. We create custom solutions based on the platform or tech stack that has been recommended, the number of features, the nature of the mobile experience, the number of integrations, and the requirements for performance, security, and scalability.

Q. How can hotels and guests profit from mobile apps?

A. Through an app, guests and hotels may communicate instantly, allowing guests to ask questions or clarify information and hotels to provide special offers and promotions or solicit feedback. The integration of an app with additional communication channels, such as social networking or push notifications, is another advantage.

THE AUTHOR

Prateek Saxena

DIRECTOR & CO-FOUNDER