The booking form is the last step of a direct hotel booking: the moment a guest who has chosen a room either pays, or leaves for Booking.com or Expedia. We audited the guest-details and checkout forms of the world’s ten largest hotel groups to see how well that step works. The short answer: the average form scores 5.9 out of 10, and not one of them is good.
The hotel direct-booking form benchmark
Every hotel group scored on five categories, with the analysis of each booking form. The top three are open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportKey findings of the hotel booking form benchmark
- The average hotel booking form scores 5.9 out of 10. That is the average of the eight hotel groups that could be scored.
- No hotel group reaches a good score (7.0 or higher). Accor tops the ranking at 6.7, followed by IHG (6.5) and Best Western (6.3). Marriott International is last at 4.1.
- Web standards show the widest spread: from 8.0 (Accor and IHG) down to 0.5 (Marriott).
- Page speed is mediocre everywhere: the performance category averages 5.2. The slowest checkout scores 2.9 (Choice Hotels), the fastest 6.5 (Accor and Jin Jiang).
- Not one form auto-focuses its first field, and none of the eight signals protection against abuse, such as a CAPTCHA.
- Guests fill in 13 fields on average, and 16 at Best Western.
Source: Exatom form-audit engine (ExatomScore), June to July 2026.
Why the booking form decides direct bookings
Hotel groups invest heavily to win guests away from the online travel agencies that charge commission on every stay. That investment brings a guest to the booking engine, but the booking is only won on the guest-details form. A form with the wrong input types, no autofocus, too many fields or autocomplete switched off creates friction at exactly the moment the guest is ready to pay. Some of those guests abandon, and quietly book the same room through a third party.
A booking form built on clean web standards does the opposite: the right keyboard appears on a phone, the browser fills in name and address, and the guest moves straight through to confirmation. That is what this benchmark measures.
The hotel direct-booking form benchmark
Every hotel group scored on five categories, with the analysis of each booking form. The top three are open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportHow the ten hotel groups score
The benchmark scores each form on five weighted categories: accessibility, usability and web standards (weight 6 each), performance (weight 5) and style (weight 4). Together they give one overall score from 0 to 10.
| Position | Hotel group | Overall score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Accor | 6.7 |
| 2 | IHG | 6.5 |
| 3 | Best Western | 6.3 |
| Last of eight | Marriott International | 4.1 |
Accor leads thanks to an 8.0 in web standards and the joint-fastest checkout page. Marriott’s score is pulled down by web standards, where it scores 0.5. The scores of all eight groups in every category, with a look at each form, are in the benchmark report.
The friction every hotel booking form shares
Three problems return in form after form.
No autofocus on the first field
None of the eight scored hotel groups place the cursor in the first field when the guest-details form loads. Every guest has to click or tap before typing. It is fixed with a single HTML attribute, and no brand has done it.
Email fields that are not email fields
Marriott, Radisson and Choice Hotels do not type their email field as type=email. On a phone that means the wrong keyboard, without the @ key in reach, and a browser that does not offer the guest’s saved address.
More fields than a booking needs
The eight forms ask for 13 fields on average; the full benchmark report shows the count for each group. Choice Hotels is the leanest at 11. Best Western asks for 16, including a second email field and an account password in the middle of the guest step. Best Western and Jin Jiang (via Golden Tulip) are the only two that also ask guests to confirm a password.
The hotel direct-booking form benchmark
Every hotel group scored on five categories, with the analysis of each booking form. The top three are open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportHow we researched the benchmark
Exatom’s form-audit engine went through the live booking funnel of each hotel group as an anonymous guest: one room, one guest, one night. On the real guest-details or checkout page it scored the underlying HTML: field labels, input types, autocomplete, contrast, spacing and page speed. It measures how the form is built, not how guests behave on it.
Eight of the ten forms could be scored this way. Wyndham’s checkout opens in a pop-up window that the browser blocks, and Hyatt’s Content Security Policy blocks the audit script. Both are described in the report’s design analysis and left out of the ranking.
What hotel groups can do next
Most of what this benchmark finds is cheap to fix: an attribute for autofocus, the right input type on the email field, autocomplete switched on, a field or two fewer. What the audit cannot show is how your own guests behave: where they hesitate, which field they correct and where they abandon. Form analytics measures that for every field of your booking form, and industry benchmarking shows how your figures compare with your sector.
The hotel direct-booking form benchmark
Every hotel group scored on five categories, with the analysis of each booking form. The top three are open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportFrequently asked questions
What score can hotel groups expect from a direct-booking checkout form today?
Across the eight scoreable hotel groups, the average overall score is 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 an 8.0 in web standards and the joint-fastest checkout page. IHG (6.5) and Best Western (6.3) follow closely. At the other end of the ranking, Marriott International scores lowest overall at 4.1, dragged down by a 0.5 in web standards: its email field is not 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 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, which shows that checkout speed remains unsolved across the industry.
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 most consistent gap in the whole benchmark. It is 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 right 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 is 13, and Jin Jiang (via Golden Tulip) and Best Western are the only two that also require a confirm-password field.
How was the hotel direct-booking benchmark researched?
Exatom's form-audit engine drove the live booking funnel of ten of the world's largest hotel groups as an anonymous guest (one room, one guest, one night) through to the real guest-details or checkout page, then scored that page's underlying HTML. Eight of the ten forms were scored automatically. Wyndham's checkout opens in a pop-up window the browser blocks and Hyatt enforces a Content Security Policy that blocks the audit script, so both are documented separately rather than scored.
