Small Luxury Hotels Improve Website Performance

I’ve just been reading an article that was advocating the appointment of a Social Media Manager by hotels. Firstly, this presupposes that there’s sufficient loot in the budget to make such an appointment, and for most small independent hotels, there most certainly isn’t. Secondly, there is much trumpeting about the marketing potential of social media activity but I have not yet seen one piece of research that says how effective it is in generating bookings.

My advice to independent hoteliers, before diving into the social media maelstrom, is to concentrate on ensuring your website is generating an ever-increasing amount of traffic and generating an ever-increasing number of enquiries. Then ensure that your reception team is capable of converting the enquiries to bookings. Incidentally, do you ever check the emails that are sent out from your hotel in response to website email enquiries? If not, why not? Your hotel might be the exception but very often the responses are lamentably poor…poor spelling and grammar and no evidence of ’selling’.

Also, if you employ a Sales Manager, either full or part-time, make sure he/she is not languishing in the office planning wasteful advertising and making endless phone calls in the hope that a conference prospect might call back. He/she should be out there knocking on doors and promoting the hotel

I have just spent a couple of hours with a client on bookings for this weekend. I was amending the website every 15 minutes and within the two hours, we had filled Saturday and now we’ve almost filled Friday. (Incidentally, I’m not paid by the hour!) The point is that you need to be working your website to fill the hotel and that means constant attention.

Your website is your primary selling tool and, used properly, is a very powerful weapon in the fight for business. Once you’re confident it’s generating the necessary traffic, then you need to be updating it all the time with whatever it takes to generate bookings.

Top priority: make sure your website is ‘content manageable’ so you’ll be able to update it yourself whenever you want to, otherwise the costs will be prohibitive.