I think it’s time to slow-down, sit-down, and evaluate the impact of the Internet on hotel sales. For the past several years, hotels have been scrambling to have a meaningful presence on the Net, but few hoteliers appear satisfied with the results. For many hoteliers, it’s been a challenge to measure sales results from their websites. Many have not been able to establish benchmarks to determine what success on the Net looks or feels like.

Exposure and Conversion

There are two primary purposes for developing a hotel website, exposure and conversion. Exposure, through search, is obviously most important. A website needs to be designed to follow search engine guidelines, if it can’t be easily found, it’s worthless. It may be attractive, but few people will ever see it.

Franchised hotels are beginning to understand that it is beneficial to have their own proprietary sites, only about 22% of hotel searches are done by brand name. For independent hotels, having a professionally website is absolutely essential.

Once a site is found, it must be designed to convert visitors into reservations. The design is critical because the site’s navigation and text content must be designed to drive visitors to the hotel reservation booking engine. I don’t buy the idea that most visitors view the information, pick up a phone and call-in their reservation. This may be true is some circumstances, but that should not be needed to justify having a website. Real-time online reservations are still the goal.

Recognizing Success on the Internet

One of the wonderful benefits of Internet marketing is the fact that success or failure is almost entirely measurable, but most hoteliers are not using the data available. The amount of data which is collected about your website is enormous. Unfortunately, it seems like many hoteliers have focused almost entirely on the number of site visitors, alone, to evaluate their site.

Measuring the number of site visitors, on its own, is a poor way to evaluate a website. The key is to get the ‘right’ visitors to your site, people actually looking for a hotel. Some, unknowing or unscrupulous web marketers can manipulate keywords to dramatically increase visitors, but the additional traffic doesn’t usually lead to online reservations. A good web marketer works hard to drive ‘relevant’ traffic to a site and that takes talent.

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