What's causing cart abandonment at checkout?

Guest data captured at the point of booking is quietly falling apart before the stay even begins, and peak season is when it costs the most. A guest books a weekend away for the August bank holiday. Room type, dates, total cost, all confirmed on screen. Then nothing. No confirmation email lands in their inbox. Ten minutes later, they're calling the front desk to check the booking actually went through. Nobody did anything wrong here. The booking engine worked. Payment went through. What broke is quieter than that, and far more common than most hospitality businesses realise. The address you have isn't always the address you think you have A significant share of hotel bookings now arrives through an OTA (an online travel agency, like Booking.com or Expedia) rather than direct. That's not new. What's less well understood is what actually lands in the property management system when they do. Many OTAs pass through a masked or proxy email address rather than the guest's real one, generated specifically for that booking and often expiring shortly after the stay ends. It looks like a valid email address. It behaves like one, right up until the property tries to use it for anything beyond the original booking confirmation. Direct bookings aren't much safer. Industry estimates put the proportion of invalid addresses from manually entered guest data at 20 to 45%, a misspelt domain, a transposed digit, a typo made booking late at night on a small phone screen. None of that shows up as a problem until the moment it matters: a pre-arrival email, a late check-in code, a parking permit, a table reservation confirmation. Why this one email matters more than most Booking confirmations aren't treated like other guest communications, because guests don't treat them like other emails. Open rates for confirmation emails run considerably higher than standard marketing sends, and the expectation isn't "eventually"; it's immediate. A guest expects that confirmation within minutes, not by the end of the day. If it doesn't land straight away, the natural read isn't "it's still processing"; it's "something's gone wrong". A guest who doesn't receive a confirmation doesn't shrug it off. They worry, then they call, then someone on your team spends five minutes confirming something that should have taken none. Peak season is when this compounds None of this is especially visible in a quiet month. A handful of bounced confirmations, a few guests calling to check, easily absorbed. Peak season changes the maths. Higher volumes mean more bad records moving through the system at once, and less staff time available to catch each one before it becomes a guest's problem rather than a data problem. The property that could quietly absorb ten failed confirmations in March is dealing with a hundred in August, right when front desk and reservations teams are already stretched thinnest. Peak season doesn't create this problem. It just makes the one that was already there impossible to ignore. What this actually costs The cost isn't just the phone call. A guest who's already anxious about whether their booking is real arrives in a different frame of mind than one who received a warm, accurate pre-arrival email three days before. Upsell opportunities in that pre-arrival window - an early check-in, a room upgrade, a spa slot, depend on the guest actually receiving it in the first place. None of that happens if the address behind it was never valid to begin with. The fix sits earlier than most teams look The instinct when a confirmation bounce is to fix it after the fact: resend, follow up by phone, apologise. The more useful moment is earlier, verifying email and phone at the point they're captured, whether that's a direct booking form or a reconciliation step against whatever an OTA has actually handed over. In practice, that looks like validation built into the booking form itself: if a guest mistypes their email, the system flags it before they hit submit, the same way a checkout might flag an invalid card number. This is exactly what Fetchify does for hospitality businesses: verifying contact details at the source, so the confirmation, the pre-arrival email, the parking permit, all have somewhere real to land. Caught there, it never becomes a guest-facing problem at all. Getting this right at the point of entry does more than protect a confirmation email. It's a faster, less frustrating booking process for the guest, since a flagged typo takes a second to fix rather than derailing the whole form. It's cleaner data feeding into retargeting and post-stay marketing, since accurate contact details are what make audience targeting worth doing in the first place. And it's a real inbox to send a review request to once the stay is over, rather than one more email quietly bouncing into nothing. If your team is capturing guest contact details manually, or reconciling them from OTA bookings, catching the invalid ones before check-in is more straightforward to fix than it sounds. More on how Fetchify helps hospitality businesses keep guest data accurate below.

“I found the process a painless exercise, which involved very little extra work from me, and the success was very high. I would recommend anyone who is experiencing issues with old data to go through a data cleanse.” – Michael Gillespie, Manager of Field Testing, Sports Labs

What is PAF? The Postcode Address File (PAF®) is Royal Mail’s definitive database of every deliverable address and postcode in the UK. It covers over 32 million delivery points and is updated monthly. If your business relies on accurate address data, at checkout, in your CRM, or for deliveries, PAF is the source that keeps it current. July 2026 in numbers Royal Mail made 54,025 changes to PAF this month. That is not a small number. It represents new homes that need delivering to, businesses that have moved or closed, streets that have been renamed, and addresses that were simply wrong and have now been corrected. Every one of those changes is a record in someone’s database that may now be out of date, and a delivery, a campaign, or a customer communication that could go wrong if the data hasn’t been updated. Delivery point changes at a glance Here’s the full breakdown of what changed, amended, and was removed from PAF in July: