A well thought out website will improve business for a hotel, guesthouse or bed and breakfast. Search for a hotel in any area of the UK on Google or Bing and chances are you will find many unprofessional looking websites with poor design, badly taken photographs and off putting colour schemes. There are 5 elements or web tools a good hotel website should have that will improve bookings and therefore increase revenue.
A good design
This goes without saying, the home page on a website is the shop window to your online business, a good design will catch and hold people’s attention and give them reason to navigate to other pages and content on the site. The design needs to be up-to-date with current trends including the use of a subtle and non-conflicting colour scheme, well taken clear images and image placement and a clean standard font. This website for example, it has a clean and modern design, large well shot photographs and a simple menu. This is the perfect example of a bad, out of date design. A recent survey found that 40% of traffic researching hotel accommodation ‘clicked away’ from a website due to its poor design and functionality.
Booking System
All hotel websites need a booking system 15% of all bookings are made online and is the number 1 purchased product/service on the internet. There are a number of 3rd party systems such as eviivo that will integrate into most existing websites. Some are free of charge and other will take a commission on the booking.
Links to review sites
87% of user researching hotel accommodation will use Trip Advisor to read reviews on a hotel or restaurant. Links to these reviews should be posted or embedded into your website. This would seem quite daunting as there could be a negative review about your establishment. Firstly use negative posts to improve your service, you may think that the rooms are a good temperature but if your guests think that it’s too hot them turn the heating down. Secondly users don’t trust reviews that are all positive, it looks fake. You can claim your listing on Trip Advisor, which is free and make sure that the information in correct, also communicate with the user who leave positive and negative reviews.
Photographs and Virtual Tours
A set of well shot images strategically placed or a gallery of photographs will help sell the hotel to visitors on the website. If a hotel is situated in an area with stunning views and beautiful scenery include images of the surrounding areas on the site. Virtual Tours will give the potential customer an immersive and interactive view of what the hotel has to offer. As part of a Social Media campaign you could allow customers to upload their own images to a page on Facebook.
Contact Details
Seems a simple idea but there are many hotel websites that don’t have the contact details in a prominent place. Make sure that they are easy to find, are correct and that there is always someone to answer the phone when it rings, do not allow it to go through to an answer machine, that is a lost sale as chances are they will not try again. Confirm any bookings made online by telephone or SMS and keep a data base of customers and people who have made enquiries for future marketing campaigns.