Hotel Website: The Top 5 "NO" That Might Turn Your Guests Away

Hotel websites play an important role in representing your brand and also help to increase your ROI by collecting direct bookings. A good hotel website design is the key to turn your target audience from window shopping to a real paid customer that booked a stay at your hotel. If your website is not exciting for them, they will immediately click on the exit button on their browser and search for the next hotel.

Let’s discuss what is the Top 5 “NO” to avoid on your hotel website design that might turn your guests away. 

• No Fast Website Loading Speed

How fast your website loads is one of the important elements of your website's user experience for your guest. It seems like a small issue, sometimes people build a website focused only on the content and design while completely neglecting the website speed. But this immediately affects your guests' experience. Just imagine if your website has tons of beautiful images and videos of your rooms, facilities, and so on but takes 15 seconds to load. Do you think visitors will stay and wait for your website to load? No, they will not.

Also, not only does a slow-loading website turn your guest away, but it will also affect your ranking on the Google search engine results page. You want to ensure it loads quickly for people who are looking at your website on their smartphone. If not, Google will not list your link anywhere close to the top of the results pages. So, test your hotel website performance now and make sure your hotel website is loading within 2-3 seconds.

• No Guest’s Reviews & Feedback

The guest review is very important as people nowadays tend to look up the reviews or comments before they purchase a product or book a stay at any hotel. If travelers are interested to book with you, they will do some research about you by reading the reviews and feedback that was left from those who have stayed with you before. Having no reviews or feedback could lead customers to believe that you have no customers or provide poor service which resulted in the lack of reviews. This may be a deal-breaker for some guests and they might decide to book with another hotel that has more reviews.

This can be avoided by focusing on generating positive online reviews from previous guests by using automated emails to invite your previous guests to leave you a review, engaging often with your guest on your social media platforms, or offering a small gift to your check out guest upon check out at the front desk counter and encouraging them to leave a review about their stay in your hotel. Always be open to honest reviews and feedback from your guests. The more positive reviews you have, the more customers you will get and the better your reputation will be.

Read also: Benefits of Capturing Hotel Feedback

• No Mobile Responsive Design

Everyone now is relying on their mobile phone to do almost everything online including reading news, online shopping, purchasing airline tickets, purchasing movie tickets, and so on. This also applies when booking or planning for their upcoming trip, your guest will search for hotels and might end up browsing your hotel website on their mobile phone and decide to place booking directly at your hotel website.

But first, is your hotel website designed to display properly on mobile devices and tablets? Check here if yours is a mobile responsive one. If your hotel website is not mobile responsive and does not have a mobile-friendly interface. Potential guests browsing on their phones will leave your page and look for another hotel which means lost business for your hotel.

A mobile responsive design means the hotel website is not only attractive but also functional on all the devices such as mobile phones and tablets no matter what their screen size. Hence, the basic concept of responsive design is that navigation between website content is accessible on all devices. A mobile responsive website will allow potential guests to easily browse and make a booking. Do not underestimate it, a mobile-friendly website will immediately improve your results and increase your conversion rate turning your “potential guest browsing on mobile” to “paid guest”.

Read Also: Mobile-Friendly Hotel Website 

• No Live Chat Added

Live chat is the chatbot that usually appears in the lower right-hand corner of a website. It pops up immediately, prompting visitors to ask any questions they may have while browsing the site. Is the live chat tool installed on your hotel website? If not, you have probably lost some of your potential guests. Visitors to hotel websites are more than likely to be potential guests comparing hotels, looking for more information, or have uncertainty that they wish to clarify before booking. A live chat feature is a perfect solution for converting these people from potential guests to paid bookings as most of them will not commit to making a phone call or writing an email for such a trivial matter.

Hotels have to make sure that your potential guest can approach you anytime and anywhere. This may sound intimidating but one of the best ways to keep your potential guest engaged and provide round-the-clock support is by adding a live chat tool to your hotel website. Adding a live chat tool to your hotel website will allow you to:

• • Immediately engage with your potential customer
  • Promote your services and packages
  • Track customer interactions on your hotel website
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Increase the chance of converting visitors to guest

• No “Book Now” Button to Place For Booking

Here comes the most important element for a hotel website. Does your hotel website have an online booking system? If not, you have probably lost many potential guests that wish to book with your hotel but could not find a way to place their booking online. People nowadays have grown accustomed to the convenience of being able to do their research and make bookings online without making any calls or writing any emails. The lack of online booking will discourage many from placing a booking which results in lower profit.

Guests now want to book directly with hotels in a way that is easy for them, which means a way to satisfy themselves, they want to be able to check their rooms easily and book them online without picking up the phone. Hotels can increase their chances of being the hotel of choice for their next stay by making this process as simple as possible.

Wait no more, start collecting your direct bookings now by installing the booking engine to your hotel website now before all of your booking tickets fly away which you do not want that to happen.

Read also: Benefit of Hotel Direct Booking

Conclusion

Having an appealing hotel website will contribute to brand awareness and increase the exposure of a hotel. Having more traffic or visitors to your site is good but it can be better if there is support from dedicated staff readily available via live chat. This may also help hotels better understand their potential guests and offer them different promotions that will encourage the guest to book directly with you instead of looking for any other hotels. This can be used to turn one-time customers into loyal ones.

At last, remember that a hotel website without a booking engine system is a waste. Your guests are already at your doorstep, and want to book with you via your website but realize that there is no “book now” button for them to proceed. There is a high chance of losing potential customers this way. This can and should be avoided. So start checking if your website has any of these "NO" traits and take a step to have a better website today.