Growth of Booking Apps Industry and Cost to Build Online Booking App

Rising Demand to Build Online Booking App

Digitization is the need of the hour. Consumers have become used to availing of all types of services instantly through an online booking app. Smartphones and mobile apps have made users self-dependent by empowering them to book tickets on their own. In this post, we have described in detail the Booking app development and online booking app cost.

Growth of the Online Booking Sector

In today’s fast-paced world, people are always looking for convenient and time-saving solutions. Online booking systems offer just that – a hassle-free way to book appointments, reservations, and services from the comfort of one’s own home or office. 

With the increasing popularity of e-commerce and online services, businesses are also realizing the importance of having an online booking system to cater to their customers’ needs. It not only provides a seamless customer experience but also helps businesses streamline their operations, manage their schedules efficiently, and reduce the chances of double-bookings or no-shows. 

With the added benefit of easy access to real-time data and analytics, businesses can make informed decisions to improve their services and grow their customer base. Thus, online booking solutions are becoming a must-have for businesses looking to stay ahead in today’s competitive market.

If you are still in a dilemma, why should invest in an online booking services app, then you need to understand these stats and facts.

According to Forbes – A new survey from PYMNTS found that nearly 36% of U.S. consumers are now buying retail goods online, compared to 29% doing so in mid-April when most brick-and-mortar stores were closed.

Secondly, The survey found 21% of consumers are now ordering online from restaurants, up from 13% in mid-April.

As per the rule of economics, the high demand from consumers is correspondingly met by online hotel booking system development companies that build different types of application for booking as per needs.

Reasons for Rising Demand for Online Booking App

There is an app for every task – be it booking a cab to reach the workplace, booking a movie ticket for the weekend, or booking flight tickets for your holidays. This concept of online application for booking is much appreciated by users for the following reasons:

• No external dependency such as contacting an agent to book air, bus, or train tickets
• Transparency of ticket costs and its availability
• Easy accessibility and flexibility – the convenience of booking tickets round the clock
• App promotional offers, discounts, and cashback that reduce the total cost of the ticket

Related Post: Types of On Demand Apps

Impact of Online Application for Booking Industry

• Several booking agencies such as travel companies, cinemas, airlines, and bus agencies are looking forward to building a mobile app.
• This is an effective medium for agencies to serve customers in a better way by giving them complete rights to make their own bookings as per their feasibility and convenience.
• Building an online appointment booking app is advantageous, but it comes at a cost. This makes it necessary for companies to evaluate how money is needed to invest in building an online booking app and how much ROI can be expected from it.
• The cost of building an online booking system in the UK isn’t a fixed amount. It varies depending on factors such as for what purpose consumers would use the app, what features are to be incorporated, and the overall complexity of developing the app.
• Some of the online booking sectors covered by private as well as government companies through the building of apps are as mentioned below:

Online Booking App Use By Various Industry Sectors 

Image Source: biztechcs.com

App to Book Movie Tickets

Now, with Android and iOS booking apps, users can book their movie tickets with few simple clicks on their smartphone. It is the best way to book online movie tickets without any hassle. Along with this, an online booking software or application offers to book tickets from any time and anywhere.

Flight Ticket Booking App

With demanding flight booking app development, turn your travel dairies into levarshing moments that make your trips memorable. Book your flight tickets with an online flight ticketing app, by simply downloading from Apple and Google Play Store. Online flight ticket booking app offers several features to travellers.

Health and Beauty Appointment Booking App

Book your on-demand health and saloon services in advance. Streamline your management process with your smartphones.  Apart from this, saloon owners with this module, can target a wider audience and increase their revenue.

Why Saloons Should Launch Their Salon Appointment Booking App?

• Salon app helps to simplify the day to the day management process 
• Schedule appointments according to the day and time 
• Easy online payment system 
• Get feedbacks by review and rating process
• Send and create  personalized offers

Doctor Appointment Booking App

The doctor appointment app has turned into a boon for the patients and doctors. It helps in the management process and saves time as well as the cost of human resources. 

Major Features of Online Doctor Appointment App

For hospitals and clinics, it is important to launch their own Telemedicine app with essential functionalities. The online booking app cost varies with different functionalities. Here are the major and advanced features that you should integrate into your online doctor booking application.

1. Online Consultations

The best benefit of the online doctor booking system is it offers an opportunity for the patients to book their services in simple steps. With traditional doctor consultations, patients have to visit the doctors at their doorsteps. But with an online booking system in the UK, patients can have consultations virtually from anywhere in the world. However, the online consultation opens several opportunities for patients and doctors to connect with them as it helps to save a huge amount of time and exclude all the geographical regions. Undoubtedly, the process turned faster and simpler. Now, patients don’t have to take the load to travel from one destination to another.

2. E-Prescriptions

Now, this feature has turned into a boon for the healthcare industry. To understand the prescription and avoid getting the risk of wrong medicine e-prescription is a good solution. So to overcome this challenge, online prescriptions are really helpful as it excludes all the possibilities of misunderstanding. With online prescriptions, patients can also know about their medications and what medicines they are opting for and in the future, if by chance they get the wrong dose, then they can quickly figure out the error.

Good to Read: 16 Top App Ideas For Startups To Launch In 2023

3. Smart Search

With smart search, patients can find their doctors easily on different filters such as names, qualifications, experience, location, and many more. However, it helps to search for doctors easily and faster. Apart from this, smart search saves time and users can save search filters for future requirements. They can also search with alphabetical order, as they will search with the spelling and get the details. It is the easiest way to search.

4. Easy Payment

In this fast pace of the world, no one prefers to opt for the complex payment process. People prefer to opt for hassle-free online and secure payment. Now, while booking the doctor’s appointment, patients can immediately pay the bill securely with E-wallets or other third platforms, which they prefer to opt for.

5. Video Conferencing

As with other social networking apps, with online doctor appointment apps, patients can have video calls with their doctors. However, this feature allows them to have a face to face conversation with each other from any part of the world. This will allow them to have a virtual meeting and help them to connect.

6. Live Chat

The doctor appointment app lives feature helps to boost the conversation among patients and doctors. If patients and doctors, don’t prefer to have video calls, so they can sort their queries out live chat also. It is really a beneficial feature and improves communication. A small conversation regarding medicine or diet can be conducted on live chat easily.

Related Post: How Mobility Solutions have transformed the Healthcare industry

Booking of Hotel Rooms Through Mobile App

Hotel booking apps add value to the tourism industry. Now, travellers can plan their virtual trips and easily execute in their real lives. With the hotel booking app, they are allowed to have virtual tours of the hotel and book their rooms as per their choice. They can book their rooms along with this, with app customers can give more details or opt for other services to turn their stay relaxed and avoid stress. 

It offers them to have a look at several other options. They can preview some other opportunities also

Restaurant Table Booking App

Offer an extraordinary dine out experience to your customers, by booking their tables in their favourite restaurants in advance. Users can easily find their preferable destination and book the table according to the ambience. Apart from this, to save time, they can also order the food in advance, so they don’t have to wait too long. Restaurant table booking apps help to add charm to the moments making them memorable. 

What’s the Total Cost to Build Online Booking App?

Let’s discuss the major concern that comes in the way of developing an online booking app, i.e. its cost and overall budget. Also, the cost may vary for online booking system for small business as well as for enterprises. We shall talk about the online booking app cost of developing such a booking app through different perspectives and use case scenarios:

Basic Apps

Mobile apps that are informative in nature, simple to implement, and do not possess many features or functionalities come under the category of basic apps. 

However, online booking app does not fall under this category as they require integration with other platforms via APIs as well as a strong database.

Database

This is a level up app category that enables users to search, sort, and get results from a large data set. These apps require contacting another website or online web service to fetch data as per the user query. 

This range may or may not cover the cost of developing an online booking app as per the desired functionality and complexity.

Features of Online Booking App

For an online booking app to make it worth your business’s time and investment, it must make your life, the life of your team, and the lives of your customers easier. The features that should make your app successful is being easy to operate and intuitive. Booking or appointment scheduler should allow effortlessly creation of a database of customers, gather contact information, as well as provide information on upcoming events and special offers.

1. Email Automation

Presently, entire communication used to be in an official way, and E-mail is considered as the most official way to communicate with the customers. Now, to book, cancel, arrive every update used to be updated on the email. To send a particular email for every process such as booking confirmation and payment request and more is a time-consuming process. 

Customers have also opted for the mail to enquire about the issues and it is essential that they should get a response immediately. Email automation has turned into the smartest feature. We build an online booking App
in such a way that it helps to manage the business timings and send the response to the senders to the own and immediately. Along with this, it automatically sends the upgrades of the service.

2. Third-Party Integration 

Now, applications should be integrated with the trusted and popular partners to bring transparency and trust among users. It is essential to integrate the platform with social media and payment gateway including Facebook, Twitter, and Paypal respectively. Third-party integration features help in marketing as well as financial purposes and it helps to handle business in an easy way. 

3. Real-Time Bookings 

Those days are gone when customers used to call or mail to the service providers. Now, mobile app development has totally transformed the way of providing the services. Users can book the service with only minimal simple clicks on the mobile application. Customers can book as per their time and in their budget without any hassle. On an immediate basis, if they required the service and the slot is vacant, so they can opt for it also. 

4. Chatbot Integration 

Chatbots are related to Artificial intelligence, offer instant and smart replies to the users, and sort their queries out. It helps to simplify guest interaction with smart answers, which saves the time, cost, and efforts of the organizations. Chatbots acts like a human and have the ability to offer service for 24*7.

5. Intelligent Travel Assistant

With the rapid growth in Artificial intelligence, Chatbots are playing a critical role in shaping the customer experience. Chatbots help travellers with different facets such as booking reservations, navigating the travel website, and learning about the train stations. Chatbots offer the ability to provide details such as destination, nearest airport, and dates to search for flights, it also gives ideas on the hotels from your nearest airport. In fact, travel bots provide services such as entire trip management, customer experience, food delivery, ride-hailing, and more.

6. Smart Search

Search option in a database is one of the finest features that can make the life of a traveller comfortable. Advanced search features include providing suggestions based on search history and nearest available options as well.

7. Visual Media Integration in Online Booking App

For a much better appeal to whatever it is that your target appointments are visual enhancements work better than everything else. Visual data targets users into temptation and leads them to make a better-suited decision for themselves.

7. Multi-Language & Global Currencies Support

We are living in an era of globalization. There are no geographic boundaries and success depends on targeting not just the local audience and local market. Online booking app has to target audience across the globe. It is important that the online booking app provides inbuilt support for multiple languages and currencies. Multi-language & global currencies support increases popularity among globetrotters. This function offers support to users who often encounter problems travelling in a foreign land.

8. Automated Communication

Seamless communication with users is pivotal to the success of an online booking app. Any online booking app should not only automatically send users a confirmation email regarding their ticket booking, but it should allow an easy way to integrate the appointment into the calendar. The online booking app should send across notifications related to changes in schedules and reminders as well. After all, unexpected events happen and all of your messages include a link that allows your clients to either cancel or change bookings.

9. Simplified Management System

A simple and easy to manage dashboard allows business owner or relevant stakeholder in customer bookings in a centralized dashboard or calendar. As a result, you can get a comprehensive view of upcoming events/bookings and reschedule, cancel or re-assign bookings.

10. Multiple Payment Options

This advanced feature lets users can make payments seamlessly through a number of channels with different options such as credit and debit cards, PayPal, and various other third-party apps. The ease of payment determines the usability of the apps to a significant extent.

11. Dynamic Pricing

Changes in prices due to peak season or increase in demand is a regular feature. Dynamic pricing is an important feature offering variable rates based on demand and supply. This feature offers travel operators the to quickly react to changing market values maximizing revenue and occupancy rates. It is important to provide a feature in-app that leverages special occasions and provide value-added services to the customer.

Several book apps are using Artificial Intelligence for revenue management and dynamic pricing will be everywhere in applications. It is imperative that small to medium providers incorporate the change to shift away from the traditional fixed-rate to high and low season rates models.

12. Rise of 360 Photos

360 photos, immersive videos, and virtual tours will play an important role in online booking applications such as hotels.

13. Feedback and Reviews 

Offer a chance to your customers to provide feedback on the particular service. It will help you to know about your service with rating and review and with the feedback, you can improve your services and can also share the client testimonials with other customers. It will help to gain the trust of other customers and they will be able to trust the service. Feedbacks will turn the high chances to grab the services. 

Additional Features

• Recommendation Engine
• Instant Messaging
• Car/Taxi Hailing
• Trip Planners
• Ratings & Reviews
• Booking Restrictions
• Analytics Dashboard
• Google Map Integration
• Real-time calendar
• Advanced search
• Instant cancellation
• Shared tickets

Admin Panel

• Login: Admin credentials to log into the app’s admin section.
• Manage Users: Effective management of user lists by removing and adding new users, as well as view active users can also be added in this feature.
• Managing Events: View, manage, and edit all the listed events and categorize them based on language, venue, time, and format.
• Booking Manager: The events listed can be managed by the admin with keyword searches, filtered the events by dates, category, view bookings, etc.
• Booking Details: After booking the manager, the admin sends the details with timings to the customers.
• Confirmation Process: At a particular time, Admin confirms the service status with the customer and manager both by sending the SMS or notification.
• Manage Payment: Admin manages the payment system, the dashboard collects the payment from the customer via a mobile wallet or third-party integration and distributes it accordingly with the various partners and store in the saving.

Estimated Cost to Build Online Booking App

In order to get a proper estimation on cost, let’s take a sneak peek into the expected features of such apps:

• Enable user to log in with Apple or Google account and even social media accounts
• Cheek real-time availability of seats
• Compare prices of tickets prior to booking
• Allow for advance booking
• Integration of secured payment gateway for easy and fast transfers
• Generation of booking confirmation mail and sending it automatically to the user’s registered email address and phone number

For further clarification on the exact budget for developing an online booking app, it is recommended to request a free quote from a leading mobile app development company.

Choosing the Right Online Booking App Development Partner

Hidden Brains is a one of the top mobile app development companies in the UK that has established a feat in building an online booking app. Being a house to a talented pool of resources, this company offers one-stop solutions to your app requirements.

To know about this company’s previous work, its working methodology, engagement models and pricing for different projects contact them by requesting a free instant quote. 

Different Business Models for Online Booking App Development

Given below are some of the main business models that work effectively to run a profitable online booking system. So, be it, restaurant or hotel booking system development, these models will be quite helpful in both the cases. These models do not include a dedicated model that is used by famous restaurant and hotel chains with global network of their franchisees.

• Advertising Model

This model enables user to generate money while making any online booking. Through this, app owners gain significant money by directing all their users to other hotel websites. Owing to lesser investment and risk involved, this model is said to be the least profitable. One famous app working on the same model is TripAdvisor as mostly all its money comes via Cost per click cost.

• Merchant Model

This model facilitates different app users to sign a confidential contract with different hotels so that they can proffer some hotel rooms with a discount since they get rooms on wholesale. The app users get a price that depends upon a plethora of factors. Since there is a good margin of 10-40%, the app owners can earn a decent amount per user booking. Expedia is making use of such a model owing to their high capital gain. In this case, the profit is good however, a huge initial investment is also necessary to scale it to a global scale.

• Aggregator Model

While hotel booking system development, aggregator model seems to get the maximum benefit since it is more user-centric. As the user scrolls the app page, he gets to know more and more options with quite flexible prices. Since there is a connection with multiple online applications for booking services, it is perfect for users with varied needs owing to its seamless operation. Once he has decided for a particular hotel, he is straight-away taken to the hotel website for swift booking. Booking.com is a renowned website that makes use of this amazing model.

Conclusion:

How Do Hidden Brains UK Help You Build a Feature Rich Online Booking Service App?

Hidden Brains UK is a leading software development company that specializes in developing feature-rich online booking service apps for businesses across industries. With a team of experienced developers and designers, we offer customized solutions to meet the unique needs of our clients.

Our approach to building online booking service apps involves understanding our clients’ business requirements and designing a user-friendly interface that enhances the customer experience. We integrate advanced features such as real-time booking, automated reminders, payment gateway integration, and analytics to help businesses streamline their operations and boost their revenue.

At Hidden Brains UK, we follow agile development methodologies to ensure timely delivery and quality assurance. We also offer post-launch support and maintenance services to ensure the app runs smoothly and meets our clients’ evolving business needs.

If you’re looking to build a feature-rich online booking service app for your business, look no further than Hidden Brains UK. Contact us today to discuss your project and receive a free quote.

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