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Mr. Kall

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

The 2011 Model Year Lodging Website - What Are the Latest Features?

By Rob Kall, President, Bookt LLC

Just like with Automobiles, the 2011 Model Year Website is finally here! We’ve spent the last month scouring the net to determine what is coming out from the best hospitality web shops around the globe. While the last few years have been somewhat challenging for the online lodging industry, it is poised to roar out of the gates in 2011 with many new exciting models, and without any government bailouts, we should add!

First, a Look in the Rear View Mirror

Before we start talking about the 2011 Website, let’s go back to this time last year and discuss what was part of the 2010 website upgrade. In 2010, hoteliers finally replaced the popup booking engine from their hotel site, realizing that popups had been banned from the rest of the internet several years ago. They also made the connection between excellent high resolution room photography and booking conversion. Every website was all of a sudden search engine friendly, with specialized URLs and site structure. Finally no self-respecting property failed to add a Facebook fan page link to their home page, but most failed to do something useful with it.

So What’s New for 2011?

A lot, but in essence it is that your website solution is now a vital part of your entire marketing and operations. No longer a brochure or just a place to take reservation, it’s much more. We have identified 5 major trends:

  • Social Becomes Serious
  • Mobile and Useful
  • Merchandizing All your Assets
  • The Smart Online Campaign
  • Turning Your Data Into a Competitive Advantage
  • The Holistic Online Enterprise

Social Becomes Serious

Rather than just dabble in the social sphere, in 2011, your new website seriously embraces social media. It’s front, center and even back in many cases. Social media feeds tell your friends and followers about your specials, awards and good reviews, through the social app of their choosing. Your team uses social media tools to gain important feedback such as tallying up average user reviews, trend them over time and use the insight to operate your property better. Social widgets are also getting smarter and can even show how your visitors’ friends are already fans and followers of your property, right on your site. Talk about a strong endorsement!

Mobile and Useful

So while some hoteliers rushed out and built their own mobile app in 2010, very few saw some meaningful ROI or usage out of it. Why is that? Think about it. Why would you want to go to an app store, download and install an app etc., just for some general information? What are the useful features of a mobile website? A simple to use mobile website that automatically comes up if you use a mobile device like an iPhone. It should have a property overview, directions, phone numbers and the ability to make and change a reservation and of course link to the full website. If you want to do even more with mobile – focus on tying it to your social media initiatives.

Merchandizing All Your Assets

The 2010 and earlier website invited you to a “gallery” of images and possibly video that showcased the amenities of the property. This is not really merchandizing. Instead, just like when you walk in to a well-managed department store and follow the main traffic path, you see enticing displays that touches your emotional chords leading you to impulse buys. The web equivalent mixes images, video and social media reinforcement (e.g. user reviews) to the eventual destination – the checkout page of your completely integrated booking engine. What to merchandize? Everything that has a positive emotional reaction: restaurants, spas, beautiful views, etc. That’s where to merchandize!

The Smart Online Campaign

We’re not saying that your online campaings in 2010 were dumb. Far from it, it was probably your best marketing spend. But in 2011 online marketing moves beyond simple text based search engine ads to more sophisticated rich media ads. The difference from the “dumb” banners of yesteryear is that they are marketed through sophisticated ad networks like DoubleClick, where a casual visitor (remember, more than 90% of your site’s visitors do not book during their visit) to your site may be “cookied”, and then sees your ad on high traffic sites like yahoo.com or huffingtonpost.com for weeks afterwards. Two key benefits:

  1. They are already aware of you since they went to your site and therefore are more likely to click on your ad.
  2. Your ad is not shown to all visitors to the high traffic site (that would be extremely expensive), only the most likely ones. A huge plus is that you seem bigger and more established, since you clearly have the ad budget to advertise on these sites along with other major brands.

Turning Your Data into a Competitive Advantage

One of most important tasks of the 2011 website is to act as an information collector and analyzer. Almost all prospective and past guests have some type of interaction with your website. The more information your site can collect and tie together with the other aspects of your online enterprise the better. For example: Did a pre-stay email guest click on an email which then generated an additional up-sell of your spa service? Did a post-stay email you sent give you a positive user review? What about the fan postings on your Facebook fan page? Are they being brought back into your CRM decision engine and acted upon? It can all be done in 2011, and the best of breed hoteliers are mining their data to gain real insight that is actionable.

The Holistic Online Enterprise

We’re now well into the 3rd decade of online solutions for the travel industry. While the website will not go away, the stand alone website is a memory of the past. The online solution of the twenty-tens will be accessible from multiple devices, social media tools, as well from the traditional web browser. The data that is generated will be fed back into sophisticated online data marts, where it is analyzed and acted upon by your team through simple to use visual tools. It all sounds complicated and expensive, but the technology is out there and we’re entering into an online arms race of technology superiority. May the most web savvy hotelier win!

Rob Kall, President of Bookt LLC, is a 'technopreneur' at heart. Drawing upon his 12+ years of experience in developing and implementing real estate and property websites he founded Bookt in 2007 to fill a void in the global vacation rental industry. Mr. Kall is a master of emerging web technologies, especially as applied to the travel industry, as well as behavioral targeting and engagement, deciphering marketing trends into widgets and applications, and online distribution hubs beyond the GDS. Mr. Kall holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from University of Boras, Sweden. Mr. Kall can be contacted at 800-941-0868 or rob@bookt.com Extended Bio...

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