Hotel Success Handbook

Your website is a marketing and sales tool for your hotel, B&B or guest accommodation that never sleeps. You need to make sure your website is always up to date and working hard for you.

Here’s some DAILY checks you should do to make sure your hotel website is working flat out getting you bookings:

• If you show it, check your availability calendar is up to date
• Are any offers that have expired been taken off the website?
• If an event or special day has passed (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, etc.) then has the site been updated so that it’s no longer being advertised?
• Are you promoting the next event or special day in the calendar (see above!)
• Do you need to run a special offer or promotion this week for rooms you want to fill – add it to the website?
• Any seasonal produce, specials or meal offers in your restaurant (or nearby restaurants if you don’t have one?)
• Add some new photos to your website of any events, weather, local news, staff members, etc. – making sure you have good descriptions for the photos and tag them for search engines
• Put new testimonials or guest comments on the website
• Write a blog post (what do you mean you don’t have a blog? – get one!). A blog is a great way of updating your past, present and prospective guests about news, views and events from your hotel and area. Not to mention it’s very search engine friendly and will help to keep your hotel well ranked (and therefore found) in Google and other search engines.
• What local events are happening that you can promote or build packages around? Remember people will be searching for those online… think about local attractions, concerts, sporting events, celebrations.
• Have you done ONE thing today to point people to your website? – Have you sent out a ‘tweet’ on Twitter? Emailed some previous customers? Posted some letters to local businesses? Mentioned the web address in every phone conversation with prospective guests?
• Have you checked over your website ‘stats’ and analytics to see if there are any new sources or traffic or keywords you aren’t focusing on. Looking at your web stats can help you spot new trends or keywords to exploit. They can also show you where you might have a ‘dead-end’ in your website where people stop looking that you can fix.

These are just some things to think about keeping on top of for your website to sell your hotel, B&B, holiday rental or guest accommodation. I realise it’s quite a list to look at daily, but if you can then do – your website should be kept as up-to-date as possible and the more on top of this you are the better it will perform. At the very least do some, or all of the actions every week. Don’t leave it longer!

If you’d like more ideas on getting your website working hard for your hotel, B&B or guest accommodation – have a read of Chapter 3 in the Hotel Success Handbook.