Usability: handling online hotel reservations for groups

We are now working on the online booking widget for KeepMeBooked. This will allow you to embed a little calendar on your own site to show availability and accept online bookings.

One question we still haven't quite resolved is where on the "simple-but-limited" to "flexible-but -complex" spectrum we should place the user interface.

Let me explain.

Take a guest who wants to book some rooms for a total of 7 people. At the "flexible-but-complex" end of the spectrum, you'd let them find and specify three separate rooms, for example:

Two guests in a double with sea view

Two guests in a twin with no view

Three guests in a family room

To do this you need to:

(a) allow the user to specify occupancy room-by-room in their search

(b) show the user a matrix of options when they book, to allow them to pick the combination of rooms they would like

Allowing the user to specify occupancy room-by-room is easy enough, and plenty of sites do this, including eviivo:

and lastminute.com:

But then displaying a matrix of options to satisfy the search criteria is hard.

Here's how eviivo does it:

But look closely. What if the guest wanted to book the Twin Ensuite (Room 8), the Small Double Ensuite (Room 2), and the Family Ensuite (Room 6)? They can't:

In fact, despite there obviously being plenty of rooms available, someone has to have the Honeymoon Suite.

This kind of thing is almost inevitable - you want to show all the available rooms, so the user can pick whichever combination they like, but you somehow need to prevent the user choosing the same room twice. So in this case, Eviivo ends up arbitrarily splitting up the selection of rooms into groups to ensure they don't have everyone sharing the Honeymoon Suite.

Another way to avoid this problem is to only show room types where you have enough of that type for everyone in the group to have one. So if you only have one Honeymoon Suite, you simply don't display it for group bookings. No-one in the group can stay there. If you have three couples booking, you only show room types of which you have at least three. Then the user can book any combination they like. This restricts the results, but makes the interface simpler for the user.

This appears to be what Lastminute.com does. This screenshot shows that the Bermondsey Square hotel has two different room types available for 2 people on 18th Dec:

But when you search on the same dates for three lots of 2 people, you only see one room type:

The 'Junior Suite with City View and Balcony' that appeared in the first search is presumably still available (it is, I checked), so one couple could have that. But Lastminute chooses not to display it because it makes things too complicated. And they've probably thought quite hard about it.

A further simplification is to only allow the user to specify guests-per-room once for the entire booking, not on a room-by-room basis. Marriott does this, for example:

So here, you can't have two people in two rooms and three in another. You can have either two per room, or three per room. Then when it comes to selecting rooms, you have to choose three of the same room type:

Both these approaches hugely simplify the booking process, and would work well for corporate groups booking into large hotels (where you just need a bunch of identical rooms), but would work much less well for our hotels / guesthouses / B&Bs who often wouldn't have three identical rooms available.

So what to do?

Another option is to eliminate the complexity of group bookings altogether, as Malmaison does:

You can book for one guest or two, but you can't book for any more than that.

Actually, not such a bad idea. Given the complexity of handling multiple-room bookings online, most users will probably just pick up the phone: the interface they are faced with will either be too limited, or too complex, to meet their requirements and the telephone just becomes a lot easier.

So that's probably how we are going to configure our online booking widget: restrict the user to booking one room at a time, which for most online bookers is all they want to do.

And it is better to start with less flexibility (and more simplicity). We can always add more flexibility (complexity) later ... but it is much harder to justify removing complexity once it is already there (as any lawmaker who has attempted an assault on red tape will tell you.)

Are there any really good user interfaces for booking multiple-rooms out there that I have missed? Comments welcome below.

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