When talking about how hotel websites should be built to attract more customers and direct bookings, usually the discussion ends up mentioning the exact same features and attributes that have been told for decades.
NB: This is an article from Direct Your Bookings
Including, but not limited to:
- responsiveness / mobile-first
- site speed
- good images
- good online booking engines
- and so on and so forth.
But what’s beyond that? What are the secrets and hidden gems that still remain untold?
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This is what this article is about and today we are going to share with you the 6 untold features your hotel website should have to get more bookings.
Ready? Let’s start.
1. Copywriting: Speak the “You” Language.
Let’s make a bet. Open any hotel website (not yours), randomly. Just pick one of your choice and let’s assume you are one of the potential guests of this hotel.
Now, pay attention to the copy of the home page, like their descriptions, their titles, the subtitles. Don’t look at what they say (content), but how they say. More specifically, does it seem like this hotel talking to you, directly, by addressing you, specifically?
No, right? Because they are talking in a “we” language.
Here’s what I mean:
This is an actual hotel website homepage description. It’s a pure compilation of WEs.
We here, we there, we are the best, we are the ones… we, our, us.
And even worse, this hotel doesn’t talk to YOU, who is ultimately reading those lines. They refer to their visitors, their customers, for example: “[hotel name] welcomes guests of all abilities”.
Or again: “Our property descriptions aim to allow any visitor…”
Instead, how would it sound to replace that boring we-language with a more compelling and addressing YOU-language.
For example: “Our property descriptions allow YOU…”
This is a classic mistake many businesses and hotels in general fall into. I call it “the ego trap”, because it’s when the hotels’ ego overcomes the real purpose of serving their customers.
If you are serving your customers, your customers come first, not you, nor your product (aka your hotel). And customers, like all human beings, care only about themselves, and not a thing about you.
So speak their language. Check this out:
Imagine you are visiting this hotel’s website and read this: they are talking to YOU. They are addressing YOU directly, not “our guests…“.
Doesn’t this sound more compelling, appealing and enticing?
2. More Data? No, Better Decisions.
Let’s assume (once again) that you are a marketing manager at any given hotel and your boss assigns you a budget of, let’s say, $10,000 with the ultimate goal of getting more online bookings.
These are the options:
- New website (or revamp the existing one)
- Paid Ads on Google or Facebook
- Campaigns on Metasearch engines.
How would you invest your budget?
To answer this question there are potentially two approaches. Either:
- You decide based on your feelings. In other words, your gut will point you in the direction that sounds more reasonable to you.
- Or you look at your data, hoping to get some insights.
I think you’d agree the second option sounds more.. right, more logic.
However, can you tell which KPIs will determine your decision?
Here’s the point: everybody talks about data. Especially the word “Big” Data sounds so fascinating to many.
Yet most times we fall into the trap of not knowing how to make use of the data we already have and we go out looking for some additional data.
Or, even worse, we take the wrong decision because we misinterpret what numbers are trying to tell us.
For example: a gut-based decision may point you to invest your marketing budget in some Metasearch campaigns, for example Google Hotel Ads, because you think you need more traffic and, with more traffic, consequently, more bookings.
Now, let’s assume that your hotel website, together with the booking engine that you pay a lot of money for, performs as low as 1% conversion rate.
Would you still consider investing in Metasearch engines campaigns?
Maybe not, because the investment needed to bid on Meta is usually way higher than what it would cost you to put forth some Conversion Rate Optimization tasks.
Or maybe yes, because the number of Sessions on your site are definitely too low, thus you need some more consistent traffic.
Or maybe not, again, because your data tells you that you have a lot of new visitors, but very few returning visitors, hence investing in some remarketing campaign may get you a better ROI.
You see? Data is like any given language, like English, Italian, Spanish: would you understand if this post was in Italian? If you know the language, clearly yes, otherwise you’d know nothing of what we are talking about.
