Oct 5, 2022
4 mins read
Incomplete bookings can be recoverable if the follow-up happens quickly and, better, automatically. By understanding why customers abandon their carts in the first place, coworking operators can apply the same tactics that ecommerce and travel booking sites have used for years.
The scale of abandoned bookings is bigger than most coworking operators realize. Across ecommerce broadly, the Baymard Institute’s meta-analysis of 50 studies puts the average documented cart abandonment rate above 70%, and travel and booking sites run even higher, often around 80%. Coworking bookings are not exempt from this pattern. Every abandoned booking represents revenue that was one click away from closing.
The most common reasons mirror what shows up across ecommerce and travel bookings generally:
Research on travel booking found that more than half of abandoned bookings trace back to a poor checkout experience rather than price alone.
If your booking abandonment rate tracks anywhere near the ecommerce and travel booking averages, meaning (somewhere between 70% and 80%), you can see how impactful it can be. A space processing 100 booking attempts a week that never follows up on abandoned carts could be leaving 70 or more incomplete bookings on the table every single week, most of which never get revisited without a nudge.
• Automated reminder emails, sent within minutes of an abandoned booking, average meaningfully high open rates industry-wide, because the intent to book was already there. The reminder just closes the gap.
• SMS follow- up, which tends to convert a meaningful share of recipients back into completed bookings, particularly for same-day or short-notice reservations where email might not get opened in time.
• A simplified checkout flow, reducing the number of steps between selecting a room and confirming payment, which addresses the root cause rather than just the symptom.
• Using retargeting tactics, which show a reminder or offer to someone who started a booking but left the site. This is similar to how ecommerce brands re-engage abandoned carts.
• A small incentive nudge, like a modest discount on the specific slot that was abandoned, reserved for genuinely price-sensitive drop-offs rather than applied broadly.
This is precisely what Flexspace AI’s SmartMarketing Agent is built to do: detect an abandoned booking automatically and triggera follow up, email, SMS, or both, without anyone on staff having to notice the abandoned booking happened or worse, manually chasing it down. AI marketing automation for coworking, flexspace AI customers using the SmartMarketing Agent, including The Yard and The Malin, have reported quarterly revenue uplift tied directly to recovered bookings that would otherwise have gone unfollowed.