MAR 2, 2018
Innkeeper’s Advantage helps B&Bs book guests quicker with AMP
Innkeeper’s Advantage provides inns and bed and breakfasts with integrated online reservations, guest management, a website content management system, online gift certificates, and shops, blogs, and analytics. From their headquarters outside Pittsburgh, they serve businesses across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Solution
Innkeeper's Advantage constantly strives to increase the speed and usability of their software suite and proprietary “Book It Now” reservation system. An in-house team built an AMP prototype over three months in 2016. After seeing performance boosts, the company adopted AMP as their standard in January 2017 and began upgrading most of their customers’ sites. “Our product requires that everything work together in tandem, so it made sense to use AMP for all pages and all content” says President Cindy Bachmann of Impactiv, Inc., developer of Innkeeper’s Advantage. An online testing firm evaluated the final interface and a pilot customer provided additional testing and feedback.
Results
Innkeeper’s Advantage’s network of inns and B&Bs accept direct online reservations. Those that switched from a traditional responsive site to AMP saw “a significant increase in online mobile bookings,” Bachmann reports, “rising from just 1% of revenue in test cases to 17% after full implementation.” Thanks to the new AMP pages, some sites also saw an 8% to 10% reduction in bounce rates. In addition, there was “a slight trend toward more time on the site and more pageviews,” she adds.
The company was especially pleased with the more flexible forms, especially those with dependent fields (such as the checkout form, for example). “Once we established a framework, we were able to implement new customers more quickly,” Bachmann says, “and we are seeing good returns for their businesses. Our customers are focused on bookings, so they’re very pleased with their return on investment in AMP.”