In the offline world, booking a hotel and choosing where you want to stay is an enjoyable and leisurely experience. People browse through travel brochures and have long discussions with travel agents over where would be best to visit and which hotel would be best suited to their needs.

Is it possible to recreate this relaxing experience in the online world?

E-commerce is very much driven by ensuring that consumers can find what they want as quickly and easily as possible. However, is this really the route that hotel websites should follow? Perhaps consumers want to repeat the laid back experience they have of booking a holiday offline when they are booking through a hotel website?

It is always important to provide those users who already know what they want with the ability book quickly through your hotel website - with the fewest clicks possible. However, hotel websites need to provide users who are just browsing to come up with ideas of possible locations for their holiday plenty of material to look through at their leisure.

Having pages in the site with pictures, video tours, testimonials and other features will help a user who is still making up their mind to be inclined to book with your hotel. Interactive features that are fun and easy to use will help to re-create the informal chats people have with travel agents – hotels could even adopt a Live Chat service where potential guests can chat directly with the hotel.

Hotel websites with the ability to satisfy bookers who want immediacy and those who want to take their time and deliberate over their travel arrangements will be the most successful.

To find out how Motive can ensure that your hotel website appeals to all guests no matter what they requirements – speak to our Hotel Team.

Most hoteliers now work hard to push potential visitors to their own proprietary website from both the offline world and from various areas of the web. A great pull to the hotels’ website is the ability to offer the best available rate (BAR) and this point is heavily promoted in most hotel advertising.

However, recent research conducted has highlighted the fact that even though hotels are promising this reduced rate through their website, when visitors reach the site this rate is often unavailable. This will do one of two things, either push the visitor away to a third party booking site or alternatively their custom will be lost completely.

This is a huge mistake on the part of the hotels for various reasons. If a consumer is promised a certain price then they expect to pay it, if they arrive at a hotel website and find that the hotel has been dishonest about what is on offer then an instant mistrust of the hotel brand is established. Also by not offering the cheapest rate available on the web, hoteliers are forcing customers to seek out third party booking sites to find the best available rate. Not only does this lessen the impact of the hotel brand on the consumer it also means that visitors are being pushed to sites where the hotel will have to pay up to 35% in commission fees for the sale.

In order to be successful online you should ensure that visitors can get the best price for rooms in your hotel through your own website – this assists in building trust with the customer and also representing your company as a trustworthy source.

This research highlights the critical importance of having integrated online reservations in order to build a good relationship with your guests and avoid paying up to 35% commission to third party sites.

To find how Motive can help your hotel reap the benefits of integrated online reservations, get in touch with our Hotel Team.

When it comes to PPC advertising, it is crucial to achieve a high Quality Score for your adverts. The Quality Score Google assigns your keywords affects several aspects of your advertising campaign, including; how much you pay per click, if your advert shows and if it does, in what position it appears.

Google assigns a Quality Score to each keyword in your campaign. The Quality Score ranges from; Poor, OK, Good to Great.

There are various factors that affect the Quality Score of your keywords. These include the historical click through rate of your adverts, the keywords relevance to the adverts you are running and the content quality of your landing page – i.e how many times your chosen keywords are appearing in the text on your landing page.

A recent addition to how Google calculates your overall Quality Score is the time it takes your landing page to load. This hasn’t been widely publicised and many advertisers are probably unaware that this is now an important factor in the Quality Score.

There are various ways of improving the load time of your landing page. These include:

• Avoiding the use of redirects
• Keeping the page size as small as possible
• Compressing images to reduce the file size
• Keeping the use of flash to a minimum
• Not having third party content on the page

To find out more about optimising your website to assist your PPC campaigns, speak to our Marketing Team.

Corporate responsibility and an acceptable carbon footprint is an issue that is becoming increasingly important to commercial success for all hotel businesses.

The issue of your carbon footprint has become a global problem and as a result a key trend in how a hotel markets itself to potential visitors. More and more guests are taking the environmental policy of a hotel into consideration when choosing their accommodation. Your hotel will be much more attractive to visitors if you have a clear and thorough strategy to ensure your hotel is environmentally responsible.

Your website is a great way of communicating this strategy with your guests and demonstrating the steps you are taking to reduce your carbon footprint.
A great example of a website that has done this is Intercontinental Hotels:

http://www.ihgplc.com/innovation/

They have demonstrated the changes they have made in and around the hotel to ensure they are reducing their carbon footprint. They have managed to do this in a fun and interesting way that will appeal to potential visitors browsing the site and also be picked up by various blogs due to its innovative and fun usability. The more it gets talked about the more interest is created in the website and the more traffic the site will get, leading to increased bookings.

This website demonstrates how you can turn the often tricky task of becoming carbon neutral to your advantage.

To discuss innovative solutions for your website, feel free to talk to our Hotel Team

A key factor in securing bookings with your hotel through your proprietary website is your online booking system. Expecting visitors to fill in an enquiry form or phone the hotel to confirm their booking could lead to you losing the sale as consumers now expect to be able to easily and securely book their reservation online.

Your online booking system should be easy to navigate and simple to use allowing visitors to book quickly and easily with as few amount of clicks and entering of data as possible – users should also be reassured that the reservation they have made is safe and secure. Therefore, your online booking system must provide accurate real time rates and availability. It is not good for your hotel’s image if people are trying to book rooms with your hotel and then discovering that you actually have no availability. This makes your hotel look unorganised and unprofessional. If people have a bad experience using your hotel website they are highly likely to tell other people about it and in turn they will be put off using your website.

A well structured, user-friendly online booking system will also ensure that users feel happy to come back and use the system again. Repeat bookings are key to sustained success and the easier it is for a visitor to book with the website the more likely they are to return and stay with you again.

Motive have successfully integrated online booking systems into several hotel clients websites. To find out how Motive can assist your online bookings, click here.

When planning the online marketing strategy for your hotel website it is crucial you think like your potential guests. Users searching in Google for hotels will not know the individual URL of your hotel website and will therefore be using generic search terms in order to find accommodation to suit them.

Only around 20% of internet users search for hotels using the brand name which leaves 80% of your target market searching on factors which are important to them when booking a hotel, e.g. special offers, location etc. Your hotel then appears amongst the competition in the search results - unlike offline media, in the online space it is much easier to compare your effectiveness against your competitors in terms of positions in the search results.

Location is the biggest factor in a person’s decision of which hotel they will stay in. They will have decided on the location of where they want to visit before they begin looking for accommodation.

It is essential, therefore that your site is created with SEO in mind – you need to ensure your content is keyword optimised to include the region your hotel is in; your websites technical structure is easily accessible by the search engines plus that your website utilises search engine friendly URL’s.

We have many years experience of building SEO friendly hotel websites, to find out more about what Motive Technology could do for your hotel, click here.

In order to achieve online success with their proprietary websites, hoteliers should have their own blog and update it on a regular basis. Even the big brand hotel chains now have their own blog and in the case of Marriott hotels it is actually the CEO who blogs on behalf of the organisation, highlighting the credibility of this new Web 2.0 aspect of the Internet.

Having your own blog gives the hotel the opportunity to get its own opinion across to potential guests and with the ability for guests to make their own contributions and respond to your blog posts it works to develop a closer relationship with your guests.

Trading online obviously means that you lose that one to one contact with guests that you achieve in the hotel itself – having a blog is one way that you can recreate this relationship over the internet.

Unlike the rest of the website which needs to remain mostly formal and project the right image of the hotel brand, a blog is a much less regimented area where you can speak on a level with guests and use more colloquial language.

The blog will provide guests somewhere they can ask questions and make suggestions for any improvements they think you can make to the hotel.

Although the idea of guests being free to say what they want about your hotel on your website is a slightly scary prospect, it is better to have people posting about this on your blog where you can respond quickly and effectively than on another website where you will not know that a negative comment has been made and therefore unable to respond. Unlike the rest of the site a blog can be updated very quickly meaning you can respond to any comments almost immediately this has already proved an invaluable capability for many big brand names.

If you’d like to find out more about the benefits of blogging for your hotel feel free to contact our HotelTeam

The introduction of 3D Secure payment technology and the advantages it can provide to retail websites has been much discussed in the world of ecommerce. This technology also holds great benefits for the hotel industry, with its introduction to proprietary hotel websites helping to further build trust in purchasing a room booking online.

3D Secure payment technology requires the guest to register their credit/debit card online with their card issuer, by answering a series of questions and then setting up a password which will be used for every card transaction carried out online. The thinking behind it is that once a guest has registered as a 3D Secure user, even if someone obtains their card or their card details they will be unable to make fraudulent purchases unless they also know your personal password.

Like ecommerce websites, hoteliers must ensure that they keep 100% of visitors trust in order to be successful and increase online bookings with the hotel. It is crucial that visitor’s feel safe to book with your hotel site and not shop around. There are a few simple methods that can build trust:

• Detailed About Us section – the more people know about the hotel and it’s history, the greater the affinity they will have with it

• Testimonials – having real comments from people who have stayed in the hotel will ensure visitors to the website think you are honest and are not afraid of publishing what guests have said about the hotel

• Visible SSL certificate – so the user can see a small gold padlock in their browser and know your website is secure.

• Easy access to all legal information appertaining to the hotel

These simple methods will assist a hotel’s own proprietary website to generate around 5 times as many bookings as third party sites.

As 3D Secure technology becomes a more regular process when buying products online (it is predicted to be the industry standard by the end of the year) visitors booking with your website will expect to see this level of security.

If you’d like to find out more about 3D Secure technology and how you can integrate to your online booking process, contact our hotel team who will be only too happy to talk you through it.

As we have discussed in a previous blog, the potential of Web 2.0 in the hotel industry is huge. In particular, online video tours of the hotel are a fantastic opportunity to ‘sell’ your hotel to visitors to your website.

Online videos are an ideal marketing tool for hotels. Potential visitors browsing online continue to expect more from hotel sites and in order to beat the competition it is essential that these expectations are met.

A high quality video that users can easily stream from your home page featuring beautiful imagery of your hotel will be more effective than just still images alone. As well as generating bookings for accommodation, these videos can also generate interest in conference and business facilities at your hotel.

Along with attracting visitors to the hotel, the presence of an online video on your site will improve the overall image of your hotel brand to web users.

The more engaging content you have on your site, the longer visitors will spend browsing and the higher the chance of repeat visits will be. Thus resulting in an increased number of bookings with the hotel.

To see the video tour we have recently implemented into the sites of one of hotel clients, No Ordinary Hotels, visit:

http://www.coombeabbey.com/

http://www.lumleycastle.com/

Hoteliers are now developing their own proprietary websites rather than relying on 3rd party distributors to attract visitors to their hotel.

Hotel sites need to keep up with consumer expectations and provide content rich visual experiences, plus up-to-date information and offers that will entice them to book with the hotel.

That said, a hotel website must still conform to the necessary conventions of good website design and usability. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the visual elements of a website, forgetting about the needs of your user and the technical elements needed for a successful sales and marketing tool.

When designing a new hotel website you must balance key usability requirements to ensure a booking, with the technical elements that will enable potential customers to find your website such as:

Usability Features:

• Relevant content portraying your brand experience online
• Uncomplicated, logical navigation
• Simplified booking processes (see our online reservations software demo) with real time availability and pricing
• Video tours/virtual tours/image galleries
• Calls to action/marketing messages
• Brochure downloads

Plus the technical elements such as:

• Well constructed pages that allow search engines easy access to your text content
• Optimised keyword rich content
• Navigation that can be searched and indexed by search engines
• SEO friendly URL’s
• Site maps to assist search engines to index your site

A common error with hotel website design is to overuse Flash imagery which will not be picked up by the search engines, and poor navigation which will deter potential customers from booking with your website.

A void appears to have emerged between web designers and those involved in online marketing. On the one hand you have designers understandably excited about the visual possibilities of a website and on the other you have marketers obsessed with keeping the search engines and users happy.

In order for online success, hotel websites must merge these two requirements together to produce an aesthetically pleasing website that is structurally sound and SEO friendly.

Ensuring that the site follows the correct coding structure in the first stages of the site being built will also prevent the site
from having to be re-designed in the future which would incur further costs.