Even though COVID-19 affected a lot of businesses, the travel and tourism market is still showing optimistic predictions for the upcoming years. It is estimated that this market will reach over $830 billion by 2025. Also, the travel market is expanding online as well.
The number shows that the online travel market will have over 800 million users. And it is estimated that over 70% of travel bookings will be done online before 2025.
Most of these users are mobile users. Research has shown that the conversion rate of the mobile app is 5x more than that of any mobile website.
It is very clear that anyone who is willing to create a booking app that not only books hotels but movies and shows as well, should act fast as time is of the essence and the market is filling up with the competition. While the market has not reached the saturation point and is still relatively fresh. It is high time for you to get in.
How much area should you cover?
One of the most important things to consider before developing a booking app is the reach that you want your app to have. It’s quite tempting to have a worldwide reach from the get-go, then just your local area. However, taking small steps at a time is the key to a successful business. Also, running the app in a smaller area helps you test the product and debug it as well.
Tempting features that you can offer the customers
Creating a strong customer base is one of the most important things. If there are no users then no matter how good your products are, maybe it wouldn’t matter. While you need users that will keep coming back, you first need people to know about your app and entice them into installing it. Here are some features that attract customers.
- Last-minute booking deals:
If you can offer last moment bookings you can attract corporates as these people usually care more about time than money. So, offering them this will definitely keep them coming back.
- Cheap booking options:
Many travelers would rather spend the night in a cheaper hostel than a full-fledged 5-star hotel, especially millennials.
- Apartment or Room sharing:
If you are someone who doesn’t have a chain of hotels, worry not as you can ask people who do.
- Short stays:
Many people wish to rent a room for not more than 1 night, while in apartment sharing you make people share an apartment where you rent them the whole apartment for 1 night, for reasonable prices. It’s based on the rent-to-rent model but different. It’s a relatively newer concept, which is trending a lot just like apartment sharing.
How to make a booking app?
For starters, you need a simple skeleton of the overall app
- You need to create a sign-up page for the users and then create a database where you would store their information.
- You would also need a location setting API so that the user could search for the hotel, movie, restaurant at the location.
- A secured payment gateway for the user to make payment and finalize their booking
- you would also require data about the restaurant, hotel shows that are there in the location.
- Last but not least, you need a great UI that is not only pleasing to the eyes but is accessible and is easy to use as well.
Most of the things that you will be working on would require you to make yourself but there is one thing that you cannot acquire yourself that is data for booking.
Famous startups that pioneered online booking work directly with these businesses so they could monitor the availability and update it on their application for a smoother and faster experience for the user.
To make your life a tad bit easier there are some good APIs that you can utilize to make your workflow efficient.
- Amadeus APIs:
APIs that let you choose from 300,000 hotels worldwide. Search, compare and book with minimal charges ranging from €0.0025 to €0.04 per API call. you don’t need to pay initially though until you hit the production environment you can use this API for free to develop and debug your app.
- Sabre APIs:
These APIs are quite different from Amadeus. Using them you can provide the best prices, reservation information, and other management services. From one-time payment to a monthly subscription, its pricing depends upon the service that you are using in your app.
- Travelport APIs:
For the integration of searching and booking hotel rooms with images, details, and room availability. This API can be used to make your app swift and easier for the end-user to use. There is no set pricing plan for these APIs; everything is based around your use case and you would need to contact the management team yourself to negotiate prices.
While the above-mentioned APIs are useful there are other essential APIs that you would need in your application such as APIs provided by Google.
Google Places API tells you about the places that the end-user might want to visit such as monuments, shops, pubs, and bars, etc.
The other API that Google provides is their Maps API which makes google maps available on your app for easy use cases. Using it you can provide the user with direct routes; mark the places they are looking for and provide locations of similar places as well and more.
Payment gateway is also important so using either PayPal or Braintree is the best option for you both of them are equally popular
After doing all of this your booking app will complete its experimental phase and will be ready to move toward the debugging phase and soon will hit production. So get started now.
