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.

Pressure is on hoteliers in finding ways to retain their existing customers and even to attract more customers to increase their revenue. Most hotel managers and owners are always asking these:  

• How do we increase our hotel revenue? 
• Which action will attract more customers to our property? 

Subsequently, we are going to share some tips on how to increase hotel revenue.

The importance of Facebook to hotels and homestay can’t be over-emphasized especially in this digital age. The number of daily users is too large for hotels and homestays to just ignore. Millions of people log into Facebook as soon as they wake up, we can easily assume that people of all ages are using Facebook. As a hotel or homestay owner, no matter who your target audience is, you should rest assured that you will find them on Facebook.

Making a profit is always a top priority for every business including hotels. For hotels to maximize their profit, they need to know the right pricing strategy to adopt. The ability to know when to increase the price of a room and when to lower it, which guest segment to offer a higher price etc are all the things that hoteliers need to think about. 

Let’s look at the commonly used pricing strategies in the hotel industry. You may choose to adopt one or combine some of these strategies for your hotel. 

Imagine you’re a hotel guest that is on a hotel website looking to book a room. When you come to their booking page, you realize that you need to key in a lot of your details to make a booking. Even worse, when you click to send a booking, you are not directed to the payment page! 

Although we’d like to think that the above scenario is unlikely to happen, you’d be surprised that there are still many hotels that do not adopt an online payment solution. Oftentimes, the guests will not proceed to make a booking if there is no option to make payment online because for them, the hotel lacks credibility. Here we discuss some of the importance of integrating an online payment solution in your hotel website.

In 2014, the World Tourism Organization emphasized the potential of digital marketing in the tourism and hospitality industry. Changes in customers’ behavior and the emergence of the Internet have led to changes in hotels’ marketing strategies, shifting to digital marketing.

When we talk about direct booking, it simply means the ability of travelers to book their accommodation directly from your website or social media pages rather than third-party channels like the Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Although admittedly, It is not an easy task for any hotelier to increase direct bookings, however, if you did right, it is one of the most beneficial things a hotelier can engage in.

When websites were first designed and developed, they were pretty much built to be navigated on a desktop or computer. In this digital age, most browsing activities are done via smaller devices especially smartphones. Thus, websites need to be mobile responsive to make it easy for users to navigate. 

The growth of technology makes the definition of mobile-friendly changed especially when it comes to website design and development. To better understand, a mobile-friendly website means that the website performs well on a mobile device like a phone or tablet. 

CMS stands for Content Management System, it refers to software that allows users to easily manage the content of their website including information, text, and images. CMS usually requires very little technical to none IT skill. In other words, CMS gives users the access to amend the content of their website without the need to have coding or programming knowledge.

The study found that most leisure travelers decide which hotel they want to stay at after visiting the hotel website.

A hotel website can be the main site for both hotel and guests to source the information and get more details where they can’t find that information from other sites like OTA.