The layout of your landing page is very important in order to keep your visitors there and encourage them to navigate deeper into your hotel website and eventually make a booking.

Individual landing pages should be created and designed with the aim of making the site as easy to use as possible for your potential guests. The easier the site is to use the more likely they are to proceed with the site and get to the booking stage.

Part of making your landing page easy to navigate is ensuring your sales messages are in areas of the page where they are most visible to the user. Where you decide to put key links and promotional offers is crucial to success with your website.

These heatmaps from eye tracking studies to see where users’ eyes are attracted to highlights how people always tend to focus on the main body of text and don’t really stray away from that.

This habit of internet users demonstrates how it is often difficult for banner advertising to be successful as they usually appear on the right hand side of the page or along the top – as highlighted in green in the heatmaps.

This problem also needs to be considered when creating landing pages for your hotel advertising campaigns. If you put your sales messages in the areas of the page where they will be missed by users, you will be losing out on precious bookings for your hotel.

It is essential that users cannot miss links to pages you want them to navigate to. Everything you want your visitors to see and all calls to action should be included in the main body of text - this will guide your visitors through your hotel site and lead them to making a booking with the hotel.

To find out how Motive can ensure you are optimising the conversion capability of your landing pages, talk 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.

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/