Best Practices for a Hotel Website

In this digital age, the hotel experience that your hotel guests will have usually starts from your website. The typical guest journey starts from putting in keywords on a search engine, stumbling upon your website, and clicking on your URL to learn more about your hotel via your website. 

Once they are on your website, the guests will search for rooms, and they will proceed to book and make payment to confirm their booking. As every step is an experience for your guests,  as a hotelier your goal should be to provide an amazing experience for your guests at every touchpoint. For example, the speed of your website matters, and not just that, your website also needs to be user-friendly. 

Let’s look at some of the best practices for a hotel website.

 

Optimize Your Booking Process

If you know how many on average visitors go to your website in a month but it somehow does not reflect in your total direct booking sales, it is an indicator that something somewhere is not right. We recommend that you start by having a deep look into your online booking process. These should be the most important aspect of your website because this is where the money comes in from. 

Your booking process needs to be easy and straightforward and the payment process needs to be as easy too. Make sure your website, especially the booking page loads faster and secured as well.

Visual is Key

Before any guests book at your hotel, usually, they will look at all the images of your hotel that you uploaded on your website. Having this in mind, as a hotelier, you need to upload quality images of your property, including your hotel rooms, the interior, and the exterior of your hotel.

You should also upload images of your hotel facilities e.g. your hotel gym, swimming pool, game areas, etc. If you have a good-quality video of your property, you can also upload them on your website. 

Bear in mind that the visuals of your website have the power to change customers' minds for good or for bad. It’s not costly to invest in hiring a professional photographer or videographer so long that you know, in the long run, it will impact positively on your direct booking sales. 

Think Mobile

Ensuring that your website only displays high-quality photos and videos is not just it, it’s even more crucial to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly!

In this era, if you don’t have a good quality user-friendly mobile website you are actually missing out on a lot of direct bookings from travelers as research has shown that almost 50% of hotel bookings occur on a mobile device.  Mobile is here to stay, and hoteliers should strive to offer a wonderful mobile user experience if they want their guests to book a room directly via mobile.

 

Read: How to test if my hotel website is mobile-friendly? 

Provide Testimonials and Reviews

A higher percentage of travelers will always read your hotel testimonials and reviews before making any decision to book your room. So, having this in mind, you need to make sure that you offer your guests a pleasant experience so that they can leave you a good review and testimonials.

By adding testimonials and reviews somewhere that is easy for the guests to notice (like on your homepage), you are infusing a human element into your website. Some website providers like Softinn offers customers a CMS website where they can add and manage guest reviews from Google. 

Offer Different Types of Communication Channel

It is important to provide different means by which guests can contact your hotel. Make sure that your contact information can be easily noticed on your website. These include your phone numbers, email, live chat, etc. Guest are likely to book a room in your hotel if they can easily contact you. 

You don't necessarily need to have a live chat. It can be as simple as adding your social media buttons on your homepage so that guests can go directly to your social media pages to chat with you. 

As a hotelier, there is certain information that your guests are actually looking for whenever they visit your website. So, you will need to make sure that these pieces of information are easy to find, else they will leave and visit your competitor’s website. Your room images need to be clear enough, your promotions need to be easy to be noticed. Your website visitors need to be able to contact you easily.

If a guest can easily book a room at your website with a smile on their face, that means you are doing something right, and you should keep it up.

 



Softinn Solutions Sdn Bhd builds the next-generation hotel management system for boutique hotels in the Asia Pacific.  Learn how we help hundreds of hotels better manage their business and increase direct booking sales.

You're reading a blog compiled by Softinn. We're a hotel-technology company with the mission to make hotelier work easier. Do subscribe if you enjoy reading our blog or you may interact with us on our Facebook Page.

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