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Booking.com is now going the extra mile to help its partners manage their bookings. In 2018, the company introduced Pulse for Booking.com Partners, the mobile version of the Extranet that enables hotel managers and property owners to access their listings anytime. Despite the app’s numerous features, some hotel managers have not yet realized its full potential, leading to missed opportunities to boost sales on the platform. In this blog, we’ll discuss how you can make the most of the Pulse app’s capabilities to increase conversion rates and drive more bookings on Booking.com.
What is the Pulse app for Booking com?
There’s no denying that Booking.com is the leading hotel booking platform on the internet today. In 2021, the number of bookings for hotel room nights increased to a whopping 591 million from its previous record of 355 million. The following year, the number of visits to Booking.com peaked in July with 704.7 million total visits.
Booking.com knows that time is always of the essence when managing a property. And with daily statistics like this, business owners need instant access to their listings 24/7. For this reason, the website developed Pulse, the website's property partner app that allows business profile owners to always be on top of their bookings. With the app, managers can monitor their listings’ availabilities, review reservations, respond to customer queries, and reply to guest reviews within the comfort of their smartphones.
As of this writing, Pulse is available in 43 languages and can be downloaded free of charge in the App Store and Google Play store.
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What are the benefits of using the Pulse app for your Booking.com account?
Mobile apps are crucial to all businesses today. Recent studies suggest that 62% of today’s modern businesses are now using mobile apps. So, Booking.com business profile owners should make the most out of Pulse to maintain their competitive edge.
Here are some of the benefits of using the Pulse app:
Better profile optimization.
In 2022, Booking.com had over 100 million users on its mobile app, which accounts for 40% of its total bookings. And just like any website, there are some instances in which Booking.com listings look good on the website and not on mobile. For this reason, property owners should know how their listing page looks in mobile view. This way, they can optimize their listing to cater to mobile and website users.
To learn more about Booking.com listing optimization, read our complete article here.
Easier booking management.
Missing out on guest arrivals, booking wrong rooms, and other reservation errors are common among hotels. However, this doesn’t mean that they’re unavoidable. Pulse lets you be on top of all your reservations to avoid critical booking errors that may significantly affect guest satisfaction.
Up-to-date listing optimization.
Pulse allows Booking.com partners to manage every detail of their listings. You can easily place a listing unavailable when updating your property, promote a particular room to boost its conversion rate, and edit your sales pages whenever needed.
Higher and faster response rate to guest reviews.
Recent surveys suggest that 93% of workers use their smartphones for work-related tasks, suggesting that smartphones are becoming an increasingly important business tool. Pulse allows hoteliers to respond to guest reviews on the go. Instead of dedicating several hours solely to attending to guest reviews, they can now easily write responses even during idle hours. This ensures that exceptional customer service is delivered both online and offline.
How does the Pulse app work for Booking.com?
Booking.com partners who have an Extranet account can log in to Pulse. All changes done in the app will be reflected in your Extranet account and vice versa. The major functions of the app can be divided into four categories:
Listing Activity
Hotel managers or property owners can activate real-time notifications from the Pulse app. This way, you will immediately be notified of your listing activities, such as new bookings, cancellations, queries, and reviews. This removes the daunting task of logging on and off your Booking.com Extranet account just to monitor your listings.
Booking Calendar
The booking calendar is the most crucial feature of your admin dashboard. Fortunately, you can also access it on the Pulse app. Under the Bookings tab, you can easily see reservation details, access guest details, and monitor prices. Most importantly, you can instantly check if guests are arriving at your property on a specific date.
Availability
Aside from your current reservations, the Booking.com calendar shows your available listings. It reflects information about your current room rates and no-show bookings, allowing you to make last-minute promotions to attract more guests. You can also close a listing for a particular date should any reservations be made on your website or other third-party booking platforms.
Message Center
One of the most arduous tasks of hoteliers is to attend to guest inquiries. Luckily, Pulse has a live chat feature that lets guests and hosts converse in real time. This eliminates the downtime in the communication process and enables travelers to decide on their accommodation in an instant. Thus, this increases the conversion rates of Booking.com partners. If you want to set automatic replies for recurring and frequent requests, you can read them on the app, but you would have to set them up on your Extranet dashboard.
Guest Reviews
In our article about online review statistics, 933,751 hotel reviews are published every day worldwide. Despite this, the average response rate of hotels is only 40%. Responding to reviews can be truly overwhelming, especially considering the fact that hoteliers are attending to other guest requests while doing this. Good thing the Pulse app allows them to respond to Guest Reviews within the palm of their hands.
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How to access your Pulse app account?
As mentioned a while ago, the Pulse app requires Extranet credentials. So, before proceeding to the app, you should have registered a business profile or claimed a listing.
Here’s how you can access your Pulse App:
- Download the Pulse app in App Store or Google Play Store.
- Log in using your Extranet username and password.
- Verify your device via email or SMS.
- If you’re logging in to a new device, you can choose to remove your previous device under the Account tab.
Once logged in, you can access the main tabs such the Activity, Bookings, Availability, and Messages. Aside from these, here are some Extranet features you can also access via the Pulse app:
- Statistics - Stay on top of your listings’ rankings. Use your account data to optimize your profile, choose promotions, and configure your listings based on their performance on the platform,
- Guest Experience Monitor the overall performance of your listing based on guest reviews. Learn what people love about your property and which areas you should improve to provide a better customer experience.
- Invoices - Keep on track of Booking.com’s commissions on every booking.
- Payments - Easily check your guest’s payments. See cancellations, discrepancies, refund requests, and more.
- Property Photos - Choose review photos from guests and place them on your listing page within seconds. This way, you can build trust among potential guests with your updated photos.
- Promotions - Booking.com runs site-wide promotions on their websites which partners can apply to their listings. Using website promotions is highly recommended, as they’re released based on users’ activities and guest demands.
- Genius Report - Genius is an exclusive marketing program created to give eligible partners better exposure on the website. Under this section, you’ll see your Genius eligibility and status. You can also monitor the conversions from the program.
- Opportunity Center - Find ways to improve your property’s performance based on Booking.com’s user data. It uses Focus Finder to analyze your property’s performance during each stage of a guest’s journey. This way, you’ll know which area of your listing to optimize.
What do hoteliers think about the Pulse app?
The Pulse app currently has a 4.7 rating at App Store and 4.4 on Google Play Store, with over 1 million downloads. Despite this, there are currently mixed reviews for the app.
What do hoteliers like about the Pulse app?
Numerous users commend the handiness of the app. It enables managers to conveniently check bookings, browse reservations, respond to messages, and monitor reviews. Because of its practicality, hotel managers and property owners mostly see themselves reaching for the app instead of their Extranet account, especially when it comes to reviewing the availabilities and cancellations of their listings.
What people don't like about the Pulse app?
Numerous bugs have been encountered by users, especially after OS updates. This includes the non-addition of VAT on the reservation invoices, errors in sending messages, non-functional notifications, inaccessible features tabs, and glitching booking calendars.
Despite all these, Booking.com continuously finds ways to resolve these UI bugs and expand the app's functionalities. The Promotions tab is included in Pulse after users request it.
What are the best practices in using the Pulse app for Booking com?
For business owners, Booking.com is a highly competitive website. As of this writing, the website has more than 28 million listings competing for better search visibility. So, regardless of how famous your brand is or how excellent your facilities are, you should always find ways to boost your ranking to generate more sales on the website.
Here are some tips on how you can generate more sales on Booking.com via the Pulse app:
Activate in-app notifications.
The Pulse app sends alerts on every new activity your listing gets. This includes new bookings, messages, reviews, arrival dates, and more. Activating in-app notifications lets you provide prompt customer service to your guests, increasing conversion rates. Furthermore, travelers are more likely to book properties with excellent response speed, especially those booking their accommodation at the last minute.
Be mindful of your Reply Score.
Booking.com gives its partners their respective Reply Scores–their average response time to customer messages. Your Reply Score will be visible after you’ve received your first ten guest messages. The score is updated daily and reflects the percentage of messages you’ve replied to within 24 hours for the past 30 days. According to Booking.com surveys, properties with high Reply Scores tend to have lower cancellation rates and better chances to increase their ranking.
Update listing photos regularly.
According to recent surveys, 95% of travelers judge rentals based on online images. Aside from the overall feel of the photos, they also evaluate them based on recency and authenticity. Fortunately, Pulse lets you update your listings with up-to-date and authentic photos within seconds. Go through your Guest Reviews and choose images you wish to feature on your listing page.
Use Booking.com promotions.
Consumer researches suggest that 91% of people make online purchases because of promos and discounts. This includes booking staycations, trips, and leisure activities. Planning effective promotional campaigns for your listings may be tricky. Fortunately, Booking.com already recommends promos to their partners based on the travel season, users’ activities, and overall market trends. For this reason, it’s best to review their suggestions regularly and use them on some of your listings to increase your conversion rates.
Be mindful of your statistics.
Use data to improve your performance on Booking.com. Check which listing performs the best to identify the features that work for your property. For instance, you’re offering multiple deluxe rooms, and the ones with queen beds perform better than the ones with two single beds. Chances are, your market focuses more on couples. You can then try to modify some of your deluxe rooms and improve your amenities to attract more couples.
Respond to guest reviews promptly.
Replying to guest reviews is one of the most lucrative marketing strategies for the hospitality industry. 81% of travelers find online reviews necessary for a hotel, so much so that 49% will not make a reservation for a hotel with zero reviews. Furthermore, businesses that reply to reviews promptly attract more guest reviews, directly affecting your Booking.com scores. For this reason, it’s best to use your Pulse app in response to guest reviews.
Read our complete article here to learn more about the importance of your response speed to guest reviews.
How to respond to guest reviews in Pulse app?
Pulse allows property owners to respond to reviews within seconds. Here’s a step-by-step guide to responding to reviews using the app:
- Login to your Pulse app using your Extranet credentials.
- On the bottom right part of the dashboard, click More.
- Select Guest Reviews.
- Tap on the review to which you want to respond.
- Type your response, then tap Send.
If you’re up-to-date with your reviews, you can also reply to new reviews by clicking the notification on your Activity page.
To learn more about responding to guest reviews on Booking.com, read our complete article here.
Easily reply to Booking.com reviews with MARA
Maximizing the features of Booking.com can be a challenging task. Fortunately, MARA AI Review Assistant is Booking.com listing-ready, as it can help businesses boost their visibility on the platform to reach more guests. This intuitive tool is designed to ease your Online Reputation Management process, making it more efficient, personalized, and time-saving. It offers the best and most personalized AI for responding to and analyzing your guest reviews.
Streamlined Review Inbox
It's easy to get lost amidst all the features of the Booking.com admin dashboard. One of the key features of this tool is the Review Inbox. Your review inbox makes responding to reviews as simple as hitting "Generate reply" and clicking "Send". The Review Inbox connects to multiple review sources, including Google, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor, giving you a panoramic view of all your reviews. And you can even configure review response automation: Why not allow MARA to automatically respond to simple reviews, like 5-star Booking.com reviews with no text, ensuring you never miss a review? Daily notifications about new reviews keep you updated and in control.
AI-powered Review Analytics
While MARA gives all listings equal chances to maximize their features and reach potential guests, what sets other businesses apart is their ability to deploy third-party tools that allow them to run an efficient and effective Booking.com management process. For instance, using AI-powered Review Analytics to extract customer insights to improve your decision-making.
To help you understand and analyze the multitude of reviews, the Review Assistant also incorporates Review Analytics. This provides actionable, easy-to-understand insights that are tailored exclusively to your business. With MARA, you can quickly get the gist of all your reviews without needing to read each one. The analysis is so detailed that you can find out about specific issues like "the water in the pool is too cold" or "lack of vegan breakfast options". These insights help optimize the guest experience without requiring you to be a data expert.
Personalize your Booking.com review management
MARA's AI knows that Booking.com’s algorithm isn't just about efficiency; it's about personalization too. The Brand Voice feature allows the AI to adapt to your tone, making sure your responses sound authentically you. Plus, with Smart Snippets, you can "teach" the AI how to respond to recurring praises or complaints. Your AI then incorporates this information into its responses, but always with different words, providing more personalized, relevant replies. This review response assistant has quickly become a game-changer for over 2000 customers. Its promising capacity to elevate your overall rating, amplify response rates, glean insights from customer feedback, and economize both time and money are the reasons behind its growing popularity.
Final Thought
Booking.com’s Pulse app offers a convenient solution for efficiently managing hotel reservations, allowing businesses to focus on delivering exceptional guest experiences. By incorporating tools like our AI Review Assistant, MARA, businesses can further streamline the process of managing online reviews, personalize responses, and extract valuable insights from customer feedback. With MARA, businesses can optimize their online reputation management effortlessly, enhancing overall guest satisfaction and operational efficiency. So, why wait? Try MARA today for free, and revolutionize your review management process in just a few minutes.
This article is part of our hero content on Booking.com Optimization: The Ultimate Guide for Hotel Managers.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Yes. Booking.com has Pulse for Booking.com partners. It has most of the functionalities of the Extranet website.
Pulse is the Booking.com app for partners. Some of its features include managing listing activity, booking calendar, message center, and review dashboard.
The Pulse app allows hotel managers to property owners to manage their listings in the easiest and most efficient way possible. It helps partners optimize their listings for mobile users, update listings, respond to guest queries, and reply to guest reviews.
No. Pulse is a free app. No download fee, subscription, or increase in commission.
