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.

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.

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.