What is the most important technology in your hotel?
While many would say it’s the PMS or CRS, your direct hotel website is a vital, revenue-generating platform hub that is rapidly growing in importance as hotel marketers struggle to reduce the cost of guest acquisition and shift share from OTAs.
And make no mistake, your hotel or resort website is a technology “system.”
Just like other cloud-based software, your hotel website should be viewed as a living, breathing “software application” that constantly adapts to technological, governmental and property-level changes.
There are a number of proven elements that when applied consistently, can transform hotel websites into a true market killers, potentially driving higher conversions and average daily rates (ADRs) simply by virtue of effective design and messaging.
Many of the best practices for hotel websites focus on optimizing the user experience, as well as the story being told to those users, through elements like imagery, social media and destination-related content. Other best practices concern technical and web design aspects, such as SEO, booking engine integration and page load speed.
We maintain a list of more than 200 hotel website design best practices, but here are 10 essentials:
1. Speed and trust
It’s crucial to have a clean, user-friendly, easily navigable and unquestionably secure website that performs well in a rudimentary sense. That means the pages should load quickly, without being stalled by poor design elements (ie clunky code and overly large image files) or missing SSL certificates. Dropping the ball here could spell doom for your website: Some 25 percent of visitors will abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load, and nearly 50 percent will abandon the site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load. (Aim for about 3 seconds or better as your goal.) Pages should also be mobile-friendly, utilizing a responsive design that adapts to the device on which the page is being displayed, is streamlined for one-handed navigation and potentially accepts alternative payment methods.
