The Recipe to More Hospitality Bookings: 5 Key Takeaways from our Experiences Webinar

We’ve just wrapped our latest webinar, Experiences: The Key to Unlocking Hospitality Bookings, alongside the brilliant teams at Red Engine (Flight Club), All Star Lanes, and DesignMyNight — and it was packed with valuable insights. If you’d like to watch the recording you can do so here. 

From diversifying your offering and building smart partnerships, to adapting to shifting consumer behaviours and using experiences to drive bookings and boost revenue — there was no shortage of takeaways.

So, how can hospitality brands tap into the power of experiences in 2025? Keep scrolling. These key lessons will help you turn your experience-led strategy into real results.

Today’s customers want more than just dinner and drinks, they want a story to tell. In a recent survey, 62% of millennials said they’d rather book a night out that included both a meal and an activity over just a meal alone. The takeaway? Hospitality businesses need to be offering more than just table bookings. Figure out what can be turned into a product – from bottomless brunches to themed activities, experiment with what works best for your venues. 

And it’s not just about big trends. While one brand might see a 246% spike in cowboy-themed events (yes, really), the broader insight is that creativity counts—and booking behaviours are evolving fast.

Emily Hawkins from All Star Lanes said ‘people are being conscious with how they are spending their money, and are choosing more experience-led activities’. 

Katie Kirwan from DesignMyNight added ‘audiences are definitely looking for new friends and new things to do. They want to show you what they are up to and that they are the first ones doing it. It’s the new, never before seen before that gets the most engagement’.

Seems like an obvious one, but we see so many hospitality businesses getting this wrong and it ends up costing them bookings. 

78% of users abandon bookings due to unnecessary friction. Whether it’s complicated forms, clunky interfaces, or asking for irrelevant details (do you really need someone’s postcode to reserve a karaoke booth?), anything that feels like a chore will cost you bookings.

So, what makes a bad booking experience? Asking for too much irrelevant information, complicated UI and never ending forms (with seemingly never ending steps…)

How can hospitality businesses avoid this? 

1. Chunking: breaking up content into small, distinct units of information. When? (Date, time, party size) What? (Dining, activities, packages) Who? (User details)
2. Keep it simple: we want to try and make it as easy as possible for the user in as few steps as possible to make it as refined as possible. If you need a more complicated flow for your business, consider chunking actions into screens to give the impression of less steps even if there’s more actions needed. 
3. Keep it visual: people want to know exactly what they’re booking, so provide them with the visuals, whether it’s the best seat in the restaurant or an interactive darts board, make sure you’re showcasing your products and services. 
4. Make it accessible for everyone: we need to make sure websites are hitting accessibility standards. 3 million people in the UK could be excluded from using your website if you don’t do this. Make sure you’re checking against: colour blindness, colour contrast, text size, touch targets and keyboard navigation.
5. Mobile first should be standard: Mobile-first should be the default in 2025. We have thousands of users across the sites we’ve built in hospitality (10,000+) and on average 74% of all traffic is mobile. Make sure your site works well on the smallest to the largest phone screen.

Once you’ve nailed your service offerings and your booking journey’s UI, it’s time to think about how you can increase booking across your services. 

Some tactics you might want to implement: 

1. Social proofing: Research shows that displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by 270%, making this an essential part of your strategy. Use great reviews to instill confidence into the user, or include testimonials to alleviate any unfamiliarity. You can also steal a leaf from the e-commerce world, and point out how many times this activity has been booked over the last 24 hours or so. 
2. Personalisation: Make sure you’re remembering past bookings and views. If an user goes onto your website and visits a particular location, the next time they visit you should offer them what they last viewed and incentivise them to continue their booking. If they’ve previously booked, you can also offer a repeat of their last booking.
3. No availability shouldn’t be the end: Having no availability should not be the end of the journey for the user.  Offer alternative times,  alternative destinations nearby or make sure the user is aware of walk-ins.

Data plays a vital role in understanding customer preferences. As Juliette from Red Engine mentioned ‘we have more access to data now than we ever had in the past. This is integral to marketing now to directly attribute what we are doing now’. Gav from Propeller followed this by reiterating the importance of testing: ‘constantly refining, testing, is key. Once it is out to the public, that is when you are getting the real detail as to how people are interacting with it. That is the key to delivering a good experience.’

Make sure you are set up to track all aspects of the customer journey and remember each element you track is an element you can improve and showcase the importance of getting right. From the right set up in Google Analytics to setting up heat mapping on tools such as Hotjar, make sure you’re getting the right information that will allow you to uncover trends and insights that drive increased bookings.

Social media should be an integral part of the marketing strategy, not seen as an afterthought or a quick ‘we’re doing a summer campaign, so let’s post some summer things on Instagram’. 

While it’s not advisable to jump on every single trend, marketers need to understand the trends that are right for their brands and the opportunities that they present. Make sure the trends that you are jumping on are the ones that are right for your brand and align with the story you are trying to tell.  

Emily Hawkins from All Star Lanes shared an interesting statistic ‘60% of Gen Z audiences are using TikTok to research where to go out’ – this is something that can’t be ignored and needs to become a bigger focus for hospitality businesses.

In 2025, hospitality is all about adapting to evolving consumer demands, embracing tech, and doubling down on experiences that leave lasting impressions. To stay ahead, businesses must be agile—pivoting quickly to meet the new wave of guest expectations. Stay flexible, act fast,and you’ll deliver exactly what today’s guests are looking for.