Bengaluru, October 20, 2015: Travel research and booking is moving online – fast. It all started with the rail and airline. Today a vast majority of the airline and rail reservations are being made online. The trend has now moved on to hotels and now more and more hotels are getting researched and booked online. By some estimates 85% of travellers today research which hotel they would like to stay in, online.
The trend is being accelerated due to an array of reasons such as:
Rapid digitization of India. India is second only to China in the number of internet users. The estimated number of internet users is approximately 350 million.
Smart phones and internet on mobile is expanding the reach of internet to every nook and corner of the country.
Emergence of other services such as ecommerce, taxi services that are making users more comfortable with researching and transacting online. The discounts and access offered by such channels are driving more consumers online.
Compared to the alternative of calling hotels and gathering information or searching for outdated brochures at travel agency outlets, it is lot more convenient for users to research online.
Today guests form an opinion of the hotel online even before they step into your hotel lobby. They discover hotels on various online channels such as:
- Online travel agencies, (also knowns as OTAs) such as MakeMyTrip, Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia, Yatra, GoIbibo, ClearTrip to name a few.
- Travel review sites such as TripAdvisor, Holiday IQ
- Social media channels such as Facebook
- And on the hotel website.
Hotels sometimes think of these channels as competing with each other. However, these channels are rather complimentary. A presence in one channel can help your bookings in another. For example, a good TripAdvisor ranking can grow your online travel agency or OTA bookings. A good OTA ranking can help grow your website bookings. Similarly a good website can help grow your other channel bookings in addition to helping your direct bookings grow. Research shows that customers on an average look at 38 websites before they make their final booking.
Hotels have typically done a good job of getting on most online channels because their guests or the OTAs have taken them there. Hotels get listed on TripAdvisor by their customers and the OTAs have an army of market managers that have listed hotels well on their platforms. Sometimes the OTAs take on the burden of getting high quality pictures and listing out the amenities to improve the presence of a hotel on their website. But no one has helped the hotels improve their highest margin and arguably the most important online channel – their website.
The websites are static and are not changed for years – it is like a marketing brochure which was printed once and has not evolved since.
Majority of the websites do not work on the devices that consumers use. Today hotels cannot afford to ignore such devices. Over half the internet traffic in India is on mobile phones. The way people use the mobile phones is also different than the way they use a desktop and hotel sites need to understand that.
The sites do not engage the customers (either due to the look and feel, load time, content, usability). It is common to find hotel offers on their facebook page or on the OTAs. However such offers are rarely listed on the hotel’s own website.
The sites are not instrumented to help the hotels understand what is going on. Even if they are, the instrumentation is not simple enough for the hotel to understand. After all, hoteliers are not internet-marketing people.
The sites are not optimized for users or for search engines. The sites are not able to attract traffic or keep the customers engaged.
But hotels are not to be blamed for that. They understand their customers and hospitality but they are not digital marketers. No one has helped the hotels come up with good websites or made it really easy for them to make updates. Most sites have been built by web designers who do not understand e-commerce. Hotels know their guests but they do not understand the internet thoroughly. This is why technology providers such as Simplotel ( www.simplotel.com) have come into being. Simplotel helps hotels grow their direct business by providing them with an excellent web presence and a seamless booking engine – in an extremely cost effective manner. With Simplotel, hotels can get more visitors on their website, engage the visitors, and convert them into guests. New offers and content can be updated by the marketing team in just 5 minutes! No technical skill is required and as new content is added, Simplotel ensures that the website stays optimized for search engines. Simplotel is also affordable and comes with a monthly subscription fee or a pay for performance model that makes it totally risk free for the hotels.
The hotel website is the cornerstone of a hotel’s online presence. Hotels must take advantage of technologies as Simplotel to grow their online presence, direct bookings and bookings across all their online channels.
