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