Hotel Marketing on the Web – to Bring Our Guests to Us
A hotel guest experience starts with a search…but of which kind? As hotel marketers these days we spend much more time and money upgrading hotel website reservation engines, investing in search engine optimization (SEO) and Google campaigns, and lately creating social media branding sites such as Facebook pages. But as important as these activities are, we sometimes tend to forget other essential items that play a key role when searching for a hotel.
I write a lot about the importance of design and detail in hotels, but the same principles should also be thought of in our website design. We should be investing more time in the creative and visual look & feel of the website by adding more updated videos and virtual hotel tours – and less in long texts and promotions.
A website successfully conveying the spirit of the hotel can make a difference (photo: Atlantis Hotel)
We tend to underestimate the incredible power of the online experience, now available even through our mobile phones, which is in essence a virtual marketplace. We realize that guests get their first impression of a hotel as they first enter its lobby – but in fact they get an even earlier chance for first impression as they glance through the hotel’s website. And that is why the visual look of the website – and not just its functionality – is so important.
The second item we need to spend more time and money on, besides videos, is the subject of hotel rankings and reviews – which show us our customers’ perceptions of our products and is in turn an opportunity to improve our services. In an earlier post I claimed that TripAdvisor is a great tool to monitor and respond to guests’ critics, but nowadays most travel websites in fact have ranking platforms, and we must put an emphasis on them.
On the web, too, there's no second chance to make a first impression (photo: Aqua Resort)
At the end of the day, the potential visitor searching for the “right” hotel, will evaluate, compare and make his choice based not only on location and price – but on rankings and on the visual impressions. I would like to recommend to you some sites and videos that are, in my opinion, good examples of well designed hotel websites, and also two interesting articles on today’s trends in hotels web marketing.
http://www.concordehotelsresorts.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS0nVnBCaTc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_0JPi7YRtU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm9sBxBmCiE&feature=player_embedded
http://www.wallopcreative.com/articles/key_attributes/
http://www.hotelmarketingstrategies.com/15-great-hotel-websites
Ronit Copeland: Travel – Hotels – Lifestyle 
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