Your Internet Site

The internet is becoming more and more vital to the distribution of your hotel rooms. It is said that around 25-35 per cent of any hotel’s reservations originate from a guest’s interaction with the internet. It is more and more important to get your total internet strategy working for you. Although changing all the time, it is generally agreed that up to 75 per cent of travellers now use search engines before making a booking, with most using broad generic search terms. A successful internet strategy will address two major issues:

• Your site needs to be optimised so that the spiders sent out by the search engines pick it up and feature it in the organic search listing. (Google provides guidelines on how to build a ‘crawler-friendly’ site at www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.)
• Your site needs to give each visitor a rewarding experience. This is particularly vital if you decide to advertise your site through pay-per-click (PPC) or pay per thousand impressions (PPM) – that way you will generate the response you want.

The internet has also given independent hotels the biggest boost for decades. Now that internet distribution systems are becoming better understood and there is more transparency, it is possible for independents to use third party sites and their distribution muscle to combat the branded operations. Many independents are now receiving up to 35 per cent of their total sales online, just like their franchise competition. However you have to be careful. There are many traps waiting for the unwary, particularly from agencies charging high commissions and demands for lowest rate guarantees.

The advent of PPC and PPM advertising has also levelled the playing field between the chains and the independents.

Do you need a site? I don’t think that there is any need for much discussion on this subject. If you have rooms to sell then you need a website. The only discussion is what sort and how much to spend on it. You also need to offer an online booking capability.

Fortunately most of the techniques for making a success of a website are the same techniques as those that make direct mail so successful.

• Decide exactly what you are trying to achieve with your site.
• Grab people’s attention.
• Excite them enough to want to make a purchasing decision.

There really is nothing new under the sun.