The Modern Hotelier #115: Optimizing Hotel Websites to Convert Direct Bookings | with Pablo Revale & Rodrigo Perez Garofalo
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Steve Carran: Welcome to another episode of The Modern Hotelier. We are coming to you from the trade show floor of The Hospitality Show. I'm joined by my good friends Pablo, the CEO of Zerf, and Rodrigo, the CPO of Zerf. How are you guys doing today? 
Pablo Revale: Cool, amazing, thank you for having us here. It's a pleasure to talk with you. 
Steve Carran: We're excited to have you. So for those that might not know you guys, tell us a little bit about your background. What, what were you doing before Zer? 
Pablo Revale: Well that's an interesting question, um, before Zerf I was working as a procurement in an oil and gas industry company, and before that I created the marketplace for a clothing company in Argentina.
I'm an industrial engineer, so that's pretty, pretty old.
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: Yeah, I've been in both worlds, man. I've been in, uh Tech, I've been in startups, I've been in oil and gas corporations, so I've been all over the place, always with a little bit of product on it, but it's been all over the place and it's now, it's nice to have something like hospitality where I can focus on and I love the challenges, I love the industry, I love the people, so it's great man, excited to be here, so thank you for having 
Steve Carran: you bet. You bet. So Pablo, for those that aren't familiar with ZURF,
can you give us a little background about what you guys do and how you're helping hotels? 
Pablo Revale: surf's a tech company that helps hotels to secure more direct bookings through a tailored or service that we created that basically involves.
web testing, data analysis, and software development, 
Right. Nowadays, hotels, and
I think that most of your listeners already know this, are losing between 10 and 30 percent of their revenue.
That's, that's huge. On commissions to OTAs, right? let me try to give you an example, right? Imagine that we have two hotels.
We have Hotel A and Hotel B. Sure. They are, they seem to be identical, right? Their operations are fantastic. Um, they have an awesome customer service, but there is a big difference between them. That is that Hotel A has 100 percent of its sales through direct bookings, while Hotel B relies entirely on OTAs.
By the end of the year, Hotel A will double up the profit of Hotel B. Of course, I'm like that. Oversimplifying this. but the worst part is that when we are talking about large hotels and established brands,
this is a bigger problem
because
most of the people that are actually booking through OTAs had previously visited the hotel site.
So basically hoteliers are paying, are like losing value. That they could have captured before, right? That's where Cerf comes in. We are here to help them build their direct booking again. They are, we are here like to help them regain their control over their sales by
Steve Carran: boosting
Pablo Revale: their direct bookings. 
Steve Carran: think every hotel would love more direct booking.
So I think you guys are on to something. So Pablo, can you tell us about your first hotel customer that you got and how it opened your eyes to the challenges in the industry? 
Pablo Revale: Well, I think that That's a complex question because I know if there is a single point in the past that opened my eyes, right?
Like, I always, uh, say that I think that there are three points in the past that inspired us to build the offer that we currently do. The first point, I think that, or the first moment was, in fact, my family, my father is a travel lover, right? He loves traveling. He loves planning everything in detail. He does tons of researching before anything, even though he never books through the direct channel of the hotel. He always books through OTAs. At first, I thought that it was like a generational gap, right? Like, okay, the UI, perhaps it's more friendly for him, I know. But then I realized that he had a point.
He told me I'm feeling more safe booking through OTAs because I trust them more than the hotels themselves. that was like my first approach and I like that approach because it was like the real user, right? Like my father, like the qualitative data. The second dot that I was able to connect afterwards was when we were working with a boutique agency in New York.
And they asked us to rebuild completely their site. They thought that the site must be faster, that it must be nicer. But when we started looking at the numbers, at the real data, we realized that the real problem, the actual problem there wasn't the site, was that a lot of people decided to book the same hotels, the same rooms, through OTAs instead of through the direct channels.
And, well, in that project, we were like building the site, so it was like another, another touch point, right? And the third, and I think that the last time that I were introduced with this problem, was when we were working with a large research, and they were building a whole new site that was faster, nicer, the pictures were beautiful, it was amazing, but they were struggling with the conversion problems. so. We realized that, in fact, this was a huge problem in the industry and that it has a lot like a great potential to be solved because a lot of hotels were super dependent on OTAs for their sales. and don't take me wrong. I think that OTAs changed the game in a total way, but I think that you should use them Clever tool to open new markets, not as your main sales channel. so yeah, I think that these three points were like the, the core of the idea. 
Steve Carran: Absolutely, absolutely. And Rodrigo, you've looked inside quite a few hotels, what do you think the reason is that hotels are struggling to convert website guests into hotel, hotel 
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: Yeah, so I don't know if the whole valley knows, but the average conversion rate for a hotel website is usually less than 2 and for most of them it's less than 1 So, That means that from every hundred visitors, you just get like one or two rooms booked, which is, it's crazy to me. And it's crazy because they have such good service on site, and they're not able to replicate that on the website. So we boiled it down to three things, which Pablo touched on, but one of them is clarity.
So, Many hotel websites, as Paolo said, are beautiful. They're really well designed. But for example, one thing we saw is that you start booking a room, you select how many people are going, and you don't see the final price until you get to the end of the checkout. So you did all of this work, you put all your details, and now you get to the end of it, and it's more than you expected, and you're frustrated.
Now you don't like the brand, and it's a whole mess. The second one, which Pablo talked about, is about user experience and the confidence that the site gives you. you can see when you go to booking. com, when you go to Expedia, when you go even Google, you see the reviews of every single person there. And this is something that I haven't seen many hotels do, but they don't have any reviews on the website. And you can do so much. You can do video, you can talk with a guest, you can put the reviews from Google, you can do everything here and that gives confidence to the person. And you also have smaller things like a best rate guarantee or cancellation policies.
And the last one for me is convenience. So OTAs are built on convenience. They're easy, they're fast, you can see a hundred different properties in a few minutes. So, when someone goes into your website, you need to give them a benefit that is going to counteract that. So, maybe it's a complimentary drink, maybe it's a free night, or whatever your property has to offer that is going to make that compelling, right? and of course, the basic has to be there. It has to be fast. You have to be able to book it without spending 15 minutes. You have to be able to see it on your mobile device. So those are like the three key points for us that we keep seeing over and over again, that hinder the direct bookings for hotels. 
Steve Carran: Absolutely. I mean, I've, I know I've gone to book at certain hotels and it's difficult, it takes too long, and sometimes, like you said, the price change, and I'm kind of like, okay, I don't, I don't really, you lose that trust almost. So, when a hotel starts working with you, Rodrigo Can you tell us what that first month looks like of your partnership? 
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: Absolutely.
So it's obviously going to depend a lot on the kind of property you are. If you're a big hotel, if you're a small, what goals you have too. But we have a framework which is goals, like DPS it's called. So it stands for Diagnose, Plan, and Solve. So catchy title, huh? I like it. Catchy title, yeah. So you got the diagnose part, which is one of the most crucial ones.
Which is basically seeing where the hotel website is right now. And that means going through their analytics. If they don't have analytics, we can set them up. But it's seeing where in the booking experience people are getting out of the website. So it could be the payment step, it could be the guest details.
Whatever it is, we try to find that out and find those problems out. We also do that by interviewing users and people that go in the website. And last but not least We audit the website technically, so it needs to be fast, it needs to be on mobile. So those are, it's the first phase, so we understand what problems they're having. 
Steve Carran: Sure. 
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: That is usually the first month or the first two weeks, and after that we have a solid list of 50 problems that we could solve. And the second phase, which is the plan phase. We're going to prioritize them based on the impact they can have, based on the effort we need to solve them, and based on the speed at which we can implement them.
That's all about the plan phase, and we'll have a list of the different problems and how much impact they can have on the website. So we come up with hypotheses on what will solve them. So, for example, we could say Okay, the book now bottom is too small. If we make it bigger and with a bolder color, we're going to convert more people.
That's a hypothesis. We need to test that. And that's where the third part comes, which is the solve phase. The solve phase is all about the putting the new design and the new website against the old one. So we do A B testing and we do half of the traffic goes to the new version. And half of the traffic goes to the old version.
And after a few days, depending on the amount of traffic the website gets, we get to decide which one performs better. And sometimes, sometimes the hypotheses are not good, but we learn more about the audience and for the next experiment, we have better insights. We know much more about the customer. So it's like, um, a step by step process and it builds on itself. 
Steve Carran: Yeah. Every one of those A B tests, you're learning either, hey, are we going this way or are we going to go another direction? So I got to ask you, Rodrigo, I feel like you guys are kind of the website experts for hotels, right? Yeah. In your opinion, what would be the best booking experience for a guest?
That's, 
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: that's a good one. And I think I'm going to touch a lot on the things I said previously, but just to, just to give a clear, a clear view of what it is like. So, as I said before, we have clarity. So imagine I go into, into, you have a hotel and I go into your website and I am a luxury traveler and I want to have the best experience of my life.
In my life, I'm going to Bali and I want to spend my days at the beach and lounging.
So when I 
Steve Carran: Sounds awesome. Might Might do that after this.
Pablo Revale: Yeah.
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: So I want to go into your website and I, first of all, I want to get compelled by the brand. So I want to see people similar to me that maybe a video that they're enjoying themselves at the beach. I want to see all that the hotel has to offer, if they have a pool, you've seen those infinity pools, you've seen it all over the place. So I want to see that. I want to understand what the value is behind and who they're talking to. Because if I want that experience and I go to your site and it's all branded for kids or branded for, like a hostel, uh, it's not going to be good for me. So it has to appeal to my needs. That's why you need to understand your guests as a hotelier. The second of all is the user experience, as I mentioned. I keep going back to that. It's a cliche word, but it's true. it needs to be easy because think about the last time you went to book a room at Booking. com or Expedia or even bought something at Amazon. After you choose what you want, it takes like two minutes to To buy it. It's too 
easy to 
buy stuff 
on
Amazon. It's too easy. It's too easy. And if you want to compete with those, with those guys, because all the internet is like that now, it's easy, it's fast, 
it's convenient. If you want to compete with that, your website needs to be up to par, so try to reduce the amount of information you ask the guests.
Try to make it easy to navigate. Please remove any glitches that might be there. We've seen a lot of glitches on the payment step, so you lose bookings that were, they were there, they were there, and last of all, as I mentioned before, it's all about the social proof, the reviews, seeing people, even Instagram, social media, seeing people going to, to the hotel, and of course, it's the first impression you get to, of the hotel, seeing their website, And that's how their experience starts.
So you want to make sure it's good and having a good offer, having a good experience, that's going to bring more and more direct booking and that's going to build upon itself. 
Steve Carran: Absolutely. So, question for you. You know, we have a lot of hoteliers listening right now. What is, if you could give one or a few key takeaways that, you know, you can give them that you've learned from your experience with website optimization? 
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: Yeah, that's a good one. And I would start with a problem we see a lot. That is, good marketing, but a bad conversion rate. It's just expensive failure. It's just wasting money because you're getting thousands, even sometimes millions of people into your website, and you have like a 5 conversion rate. You could have double or triple that, and that literally is double the revenue.
So that's number one. If you're going to focus on marketing, try to optimize the website before. Try to optimize before. And for that point, before that, you need to know your audience, which is what I was touching on before. You need to know your audience and you need to understand them to make a good experience.
Then the second one, I think this is a great opportunity to, for luxury brands and big hotels. Because they already have the marketing machinery going on. And sometimes, it happened with our clients. Sometimes we made small changes and since they have such a big website traffic, 20, 30, even 100 percent we've done. Increasing their conversion rate means that that they're getting double the revenue. 
Pablo Revale: I think that sometimes, successful hotels and research rely on their past success, right? And they are not adapting properly to the new technologies, to the new changes that they're. world demands, right? and sometimes we have a problem on the conversion. We have a problem in the booking flow, but in reality, that's, it's an information problem, right? You are not gathering the proper data from the guest, or perhaps you're asking too much information because you are used to that. And well, the world's changing. So you must adapt because if the competitor is asking too much. Half of the fields that you're asking for, perhaps you need to look for new ways of gathering that information and to offer the same top tier service, but in a different way.
Great, great 
point. 
Pablo, 
I 
gotta 
ask 
Steve Carran: you, 
you're 
the 
CEO, 
what do 
you 
hope 
the 
lasting 
impression Zerf leaves on 
hospitality
industry? 
Pablo Revale: industry? That's, a deep question, 
yeah. 
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: question, yeah. 
Pablo Revale: Well, I think that nowadays hotels are so dependent on OTAs, are so dependent on third party organizations for a lot of things and we are here to really change that. We want to be able to help hotels to really regain and rebuild their power because we think that every hotel must have the power to grow on its own. so we want to have more A hotels, more direct booking hotels. We want to bring symmetry to the industry, right? Because there is a, an author that I really love that it's called Daniel H. Pink. Perhaps you know him. he talks a lot about the symmetry of information, right? when OTAs arise, they like change the whole game and I think that we are here to bring some kind of balance and to give hoteliers their power back 
Steve Carran: power 
Pablo Revale: to be able to scale up. 
Steve Carran: I love that. And I think OTAs have a place, right? Like I, when I go look for a hotel in a community, I usually go to Expedia or something first and I sit, find kind of the hotels, but then I go to their website.
And if I have four tabs open with four different hotels, and one of them has an incredible website that's transparent about the experiences they offer, transparent about price, it's a huge, huge positive where most likely I'm going to. 
Pablo Revale: Book that hotel, 
right? Yeah. Well, a quick tip for hoteliers here is that a lot of sites don't have, the feature of opening different tabs. So you must go back and forth. To check rates, That's 
terrible. 
And 
that's
a 
very 
awesome feature of any OTA, but yes totally.
Steve Carran: What a good point. That's a good tip for all hoteliers out there for your website. You got a free one right there. So, Rodrigo, for those that might not be familiar with you guys, or might not know how to find you, what is the best way that they can get in touch with either you, Pablo, or Rodrigo? 
Rodrigo Perez Garofalo: So, of course, we're very active on LinkedIn, so if you want to shoot me a message, shoot Pablo a message, you got our name, so. Feel free to reach us that way, or if not, you can go visit our website, which is serve. tech, and there you'll find all the information about us, how we work, who the people are, because the team is actually very important, and yeah, that's how they can find us.
We want to free hoteliers from the burden of having to think about technology and just freedom to give the best experience that I guess can happen. I 
Steve Carran: I love that and I think every hotel will agree they would love to keep more money in their own pockets than paying those 30 percent commission rates.
Pablo Rodrigo, thank you guys for stopping by. Really appreciate hearing what's going on at Zerf and how you guys are changing the industry. This does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. Thank you for watching or listening. Have a great day.