Make it Sexy: Hotel Bookings the Way We Want

By Samantha Shankman and Tansy Kaschak on 02.10.22

We just love how the hotels we love meticulously build their brands to make our excitement kick off long before we pack our bags. Channels like social media and websites are the entry door to a world of dream, desire, and planning. Everything that happens before arrival is a fundamental part of the experience, including the booking process. But it turns out that getting that room and rate secured is often not as smooth and easy as it should — and could — be.

“Imagine you go to a luxury boutique and are told that you have to go across the street to pay before coming back for your purchase. That’s what happens on hotels’ websites.” Khalid Meniri, founder of Selfbook, an innovative booking technology, spent the last many years truly living a hotel life and realized how often he had to deal with jumping between clunky and cumbersome check out forms that did no justice to the amazing places he was spending time at. 

Having previously built SIX Travel, a curated list of hotels that counted on its own smart, safe, and good looking one-click payment feature, he understood the need to democratize SIX’s technology and make it available to hotels. So, Selfbook was born. Now, instead of spending thousands of dollars and precious time to build anything like it, hotels can have it all by adding one single line of code to their websites. 

With this single line of code, Selfbook takes hotels’ payment experience to the next level by integrating digital wallet support and enabling Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal. The software seamlessly integrates into the hotel’s existing platforms to deliver that dream-state where every brand touchpoint aligns with the larger vision, from mobile to tablet to desktop.

All In One For Everything We Want 

With Selfbook’s modern e-commerce interface, guests can book and customize their stay by selecting room types and adding reservations, from facials to lunch by the pool. NoMad London — one of the most recent additions to the Selfbook family — makes full use of the technology by offering guests the option to bring a pet along for their stay, with a bowl and treats front and center in the add-ons list. A tour of the Bow Street Museum in the hotel’s Covent Garden neighborhood is also just a click away, making an immersive travel experience possible within a single checkout flow.

Working with leading partners across the hospitality ecosystem to bring all pieces of the puzzle to one place, Selfbook takes care of all possible variables and all interested parties in a way that no other technology has been able to seamlessly do so before. At the same time it gives consumers the chance to easily manage and tailor stays, this efficiency is allowing hotels to boost direct bookings by more than a quarter compared to pre-pandemic levels and, as a result, secure additional revenue.

And to make it even more effortless, all the hard work happens backstage: users only have to click away on a sleek interface. As AHL founder Ben Pundole said in a recent conversation with Khalid, “it’s the technology that we don’t see or notice that is actually the most successful.”

Read more about Selfbook, here.