As a hotel owner in Thailand, we know that you spend lots of time and money making sure your property is perfect for your guests arrival. But unfortunately, having the perfect hotel or resort will be missed, if your current website isn’t visible or optimally displaying what your hotel offers.
Your hotel website acts as your own customized sales tool, which unlike OTA’s and social media platforms, can be personally branded to match the very image you want for your potential guests.
Your website is often the first or second online impression that consumers have before booking, which often leads to a definitive reason for a customer to book or keep browsing for other properties.
Outdated, tired-looking hotel websites that are difficult to navigate or unintuitive are likely to push a guest away from the booking button, rather than towards it.
So how do you decide that it’s time to upgrade your hotel or property website? We have compiled our 5 top reasons below:
1. Lack of Direct Bookings or Contact Form Requests
The first red flag that your website is under-performing, is that you are not receiving any call-to-action from your potential customers. This should be the initial step that leads you to conduct an audit to determine if your website really provides the experience necessary to guide its visitors towards the booking button.
2. The Navigation and Booking Experience Isn’t Intuitive
As we enter the Web3 era, visitors expect an intuitive experience where finding the desired content is effortless. Can your visitors easily access high value content such as rooms and promotions from the landing instance? A common denominator in Hotel websites with a powerful conversion rate and a low bounce rate, are a clear and well thought-out sitemap which is easily accessible from the top-fold navigation.
3. PDPA and The Google Algorithm Updates
PDPA
In June this year, The PDPA came into force. The core fundamentals are similar to that of the GDPR, which ultimately gives data subjects (visitors) the right to request access to their personal data and demand for such data to be erased. They also have the right to object to the collection, usage or disclosure of their personal information.
To ensure full compliance with this regulation, it is expect for hotels to implement a Cookie Privacy Policy opt-in, along with Privacy statement (usually located in an accessible place like the footer).
Not confirming to the above regulations and continuing to use tracking tags may have regulatory consequences, and is another key indicator that your website is not being continually maintained or updated.
The Google Page Experience Update
The Google Page Experience came into effect from 2021. Google now ranks sites based on how users perceive the experience of interacting with your website. Therefore, if Google believes your website users will have a poor experience on your web pages, you will be ranked much lower and potential hotel guests will not find you.
A few of the metrics they will be taking into account will be:
- Website Loading performance (how quickly does content and media appear on the screen)
- Website Responsiveness (how fast does the page react to user input)
- Website Visual Stability (are there interactive parts moving around the page during browsing)
4. Your Website isn’t Mobile Responsive
Any website which is unable to confirm to today’s responsive design standard will lose search engine rankings and visitors. As mobile-first continues to grow, site owners need their online platform to be accessible and bookable.
This factor is a global requirement for any e-commerce business, and not specifically to the hotel industry. Here are a few jaw-dropping statistics from 2021:
70% of web traffic comes from mobile phones.
80% of the top-ranked websites are mobile-friendly.
61% of users will never return to a website that is not mobile-friendly
70% of the searches made on mobile phones lead to online action
Blue Corona
5. You’re a New or Soon-to-be Hotel Owner
If you’ve recently bought a property, are currently building one, it’s essential to consider investing in a new website at the very earliest stage.
As a new hotel, you won’t benefit from the quantity of reviews/testimonials which the properties who have been established for a while will have. You also won’t have the loyal social media following that your rival hotels will have built up over the years in the hospitality business. Therefore it’s essential to capitalise on all opportunities available, and invest in a website to show off the brand new media and navigate your users straight towards the booking button.
Ace Marketing Solutions- Hotel Website Design Service
Ace Marketing Solutions has been building hotel websites for close to a decade. If you would like to discuss making some custom changes or building a new hotel website, we’ll be happy to talk: 063-792-5666
