Hotel Performance in a Downturn
If you’re an owner of a small, independent, luxury hotel and you’re concerned about the possible adverse effects of the ‘credit crunch’, your top priority must be the performance of your website. In fact, you will never know how much revenue your hotel is capable of generating until your website is operating to the maximum.
Is your website properly search engine optimised? Are you monitoring the performance of your website? Do you know if traffic to it is going up or going down? Are you updating it regularly with special breaks rather than ‘offers’? (Breaks can be added value, offers mean discount) Do you have a Late Availability page that you can edit when you need? How much of your current traffic is coming via the search engines, how much is coming via referral sites and how much is coming direct? How much do you rely on hotel portal websites and at what cost?
Then, of course, if your website is producing loads of enquiries, who is in charge of converting them into bookings? Do they realise they are supposed to be selling when they answer the phone or responding to email enquiries?
You or someone in your hotel must know the answers so you can react swiftly to keep the site performing well. There is so much you can be doing to stimulate business via your own website enabling you, perhaps, to cut expenditure elsewhere. No other medium is so cost effective and no other medium is capable of generating anywhere near the revenue your website is capable of generating.
You need a high performance website in an economic downturn.