The potential of form improvement for winning more direct hotel bookings
This benchmark report highlights a clear opportunity for the world’s largest hotel groups: to win more direct bookings — and reduce reliance on commission-charging OTAs — by optimising their guest-details and booking forms. The booking form is the final conversion point in the direct-booking funnel: it is where a browsing guest either becomes a paying one, or abandons for Booking.com or Expedia instead. Yet across the ten groups audited, checkout forms remain riddled with avoidable friction.
What does the average hotel booking form score today?
- The eight scoreable hotel groups average just 5.9 out of 10 overall — “Fair,” not “Good.”
- Not one of the eight reaches the “Good” threshold (7.0+); Accor tops the table at 6.7.
- Web standards shows the widest spread of any category: from 8.0 (Accor, IHG) down to 0.5 (Marriott).
Source: Exatom form-audit engine (ExatomScore), June–July 2026
This points to a major inefficiency at exactly the moment guests are ready to pay. Poorly built booking forms create unnecessary friction — through incorrect input types, missing autofocus, excessive fields or disabled autocomplete — leading to abandoned bookings and a quiet drift back to third-party OTAs. Conversely, a booking form built on clean web standards keeps guests moving straight through to confirmation.
Form score
Technical UX audit of guest-details / checkout forms across 8 scoreable hotel groups of the world's ten largest, measured with the Exatom form-audit engine (ExatomScore). Scores run 0–10, higher is better. Weighted across five categories. Wyndham and Hyatt could not be auto-scored for technical reasons – see Design analysis – and are excluded from the ranking below.
| Brand | Overall ↓ | Accessibility | Performance | Style | Usability | Web standards |
|---|
Accessibility
Measures how usable the checkout form is for all guests: semantic HTML, label associations, ARIA attributes, keyboard navigation, and colour-contrast compliance. Hilton leads (7.6); Marriott is the outlier (2.6) on low-contrast, placeholder-only labels. Field average: 5.7. Weight in overall score: ×6.
Performance
Covers page speed and responsiveness on the guest-details / checkout page. Weight in overall score: ×5.
Style
Evaluates visual design: field alignment and sizing, label placement, font consistency, form position, and responsive layout. Marriott (7.1) and Radisson (7.0) present best – Marriott styles well even as its underlying semantics fail. Jin Jiang (Golden Tulip) is weakest (4.3). Field average: 5.6. Weight in overall score: ×4.
Usability
Covers autocomplete, sensible field counts, first-field focus, keyboard navigation, CTA clarity, and avoidance of needless repetition. No brand excels here – the first field is never auto-focused, and forms carry more inputs than the task requires. Marriott trails (3.7), dragged down by disabled autocomplete. Field average: 5.5. Weight in overall score: ×6.
Web standards
The most conversion-relevant category technically: correct, semantic HTML – the right input types (e.g. type=email), real label elements, and a proper form element – driving native validation, autofill and assistive-technology support. Accor and IHG are exemplary (8.0); Marriott (0.5), Radisson (3.4) and Choice (4.2) leave easy wins on the table. Widest spread in the whole benchmark. Field average: 5.4. Weight in overall score: ×6.
Design analysis
Structural audit of guest-details / checkout forms across all 10 assessed hotel groups. Every brand is multi-step at the funnel level (four to six screens to reach guest details); at the form level nearly every brand consolidates guest information and payment onto one final page – Accor is the mild exception, separating details from payment. Field counts range from 11 (Choice Hotels) to 16 (Best Western), averaging 13 across the eight scored forms.
| Brand | Structure | Checkout layout | Progress indicator | Single-page checkout | Password / account field | Fields |
|---|
Score distribution
Min / average / max spread of ExatomScore results across the eight benchmarked hotel groups, by category – higher is always better here. Followed by brand-by-brand notes on each form's key strength and primary risk, including the two brands that could not be auto-scored.
| Brand | Score | Key strength | Key risk |
|---|
Frequently asked questions
Answers to the questions readers most often ask after reviewing the hotel direct-booking benchmark.
What score can hotel groups expect from a direct-booking checkout form today?
Across the eight scoreable hotel groups, the average overall score is just 5.9 out of 10 — "Fair," not "Good." The best-performing brand, Accor, reaches 6.7; the weakest, Marriott International, scores 4.1. Not one of the ten groups assessed clears the 7.0 threshold for a "Good" checkout form.
Which hotel group has the best-performing direct-booking form?
Accor leads the benchmark with an overall score of 6.7 out of 10, driven by a perfect 8.0 in web standards and the joint-fastest checkout page. IHG (6.5) and Best Western (6.3) follow closely behind. At the other end of the ranking, Marriott International scores lowest overall at 4.1, dragged down by a 0.5 in web standards — the email field isn't even typed as email.
Why do so many hotel checkout forms perform poorly on page speed?
Performance is the most uniformly mediocre category in the benchmark, averaging just 5.2 out of 10 — lower than accessibility, usability, style or web standards. Choice Hotels was the slowest of the eight at 2.9, while Accor and Jin Jiang (via Golden Tulip) tied for fastest at 6.5. Even the best result falls well short of a "Good" score, showing that checkout-page speed remains unsolved industry-wide.
Why does no hotel checkout form auto-focus the first field?
The audit found that none of the eight scored hotel groups auto-focus the first field when the guest-details form loads — the single most consistent gap in the whole benchmark. It's a one-attribute fix that no brand has made. Correct input types are almost as rare: Marriott, Radisson and Choice Hotels all fail to type their email field as type=email, which silently disables the correct mobile keyboard and browser autofill.
Which hotel checkout form asks for the most information?
Best Western's form carries the heaviest load in the benchmark at 16 fields, including a confirm-email field and an account password inside the guest step. Choice Hotels is leanest at 11 fields. Across the eight scored forms, the average sits at 13 — and Jin Jiang (via Golden Tulip) and Best Western are the only two that also require a confirm-password field, adding friction most competitors skip.
How was the hotel direct-booking benchmark researched?
Exatom's form-audit engine drove the live booking funnel for ten of the world's largest hotel groups as an anonymous guest — one room, one guest, one night — through to the real guest-details/checkout page, then scored that page's underlying HTML. Eight of the ten forms were scored automatically; Wyndham's checkout opens in a browser-blocked pop-up window, and Hyatt enforces a Content Security Policy that blocks the audit script, so both are documented separately rather than scored.