10 Tips for A Successful Hotel Website in 2021

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, people are choosing a place to stay on their holiday based on the hotel website (Hotel direct channels gained share of bookings in 2020). You don't want to miss out on this opportunity. Therefore, you need an awesome hotel website. Of course, you already know your hotel website needs to look appealing and load quickly, but there's more to it than that. Here are a few tips for a successful hotel website in 2021.

1. Content That's Easy to Scan

When looking for a place to stay on holiday, your potential customers don't want to read a book to find out if your hotel has a pool or a location close to the beach. They want to scan your luxury hotel website and pick out important information, such as location, amenities, and restaurant options. Studies have found that website visitors formed an opinion about the page in the first 50 milliseconds.

Attracting and keeping your website visitors does not need to be difficult. It can be simple with the right hospitality website agency. Additionally, make sure you have a stunning photo of your hotel or a video on the landing page for functional and attractive hotel website design. Some hotels feature average photos, but you want your customers to picture themselves in gorgeous settings.

Furthermore, you want to make the most of catchy headlines and bulleted lists. Short paragraphs are also important. Answer the questions you would have about a hotel in these areas. With these answers readily available, you'll find more customers booking their stay at your property.

2. Mimic Copy to Sound Like Your Customers

You may refer to rooms as accommodations, but do customers understand what that means? You need to write website copy that reflects how your customer base speaks about hotels. It's a good idea to visit forums for people looking for hotels to see the common jargon.

Once you have a feel for the way your possible clients refer to various hotel amenities, you can mimic it on your hotel website. Using similar wording about your hotel helps your hotel website design seem more personable and attractive.

3. Live Chat or Chatbots

There's nothing more frustrating for a potential customer than to have questions and no easy way to find answers. Offering the option for live chat or chatbots can help you connect with these customers to quickly provide them with the information they need to book a reservation with confidence.

Live chat is the best way to go if you can handle it, but a chatbot can answer commonly asked questions and direct the customer to a live person. Communication with your customers can help you book more stays.

4. Create SEO Content Search engine optimization (SEO)

Content helps your hotel website rank higher in the list of possibilities your customer base sees when they search for a luxury hotel in your area. By mentioning keywords and phrases, such as ‘best brunch in X’ or ‘best time to visit X,’ in your website copy, Google will drive new organic traffic to your luxury hotel website.

5. Hotel Blog That Provides Local Knowledge

From what to do to where to eat, a blog can encourage your potential customer base to visit your locale (Travelers Still Want Unique Accommodations and New Experiences). When you offer a blog insight into your area, you set yourself up as experts. Guests want to stay at hotels where the staff can recommend the best, out-of-the-way places to eat and visit.

More and more travellers are looking for authentic experiences and not tourist attractions. These authentic experiences don't happen by chance－you need a local to help guide you to them. When your hotel website blog makes these authentic suggestions, customers find your hotel more desirable.

6. Provide Events and Activities by the Seasons

Does your local community have a corn maze in the fall? Or a tulip festival in the spring? To execute phenomenal hotel website marketing, create a page that highlights special events and activities in your community and the surrounding area. However, you want to carefully group these activities by season. Some activities will appeal more to a particular customer than others, and you don't want them to get excited by an activity that isn't available during their stay. This makes it essential to group activities by the time of year they occur.

7. Provide Benefits for Booking a Room Directly

There are so many travel websites that offer hotel rooms that you need a way to convince the customer to book their room on your website. You might offer a welcome page or a free breakfast. If you have a points reward program, you can offer additional points by booking through your hotel website. Listing your rooms on one of those travel websites costs you money when customers book through those websites instead of your own. If you can encourage people to book directly with small enticements, you can book more rooms and keep more of the revenue.

8. Offer Customer Reviews

Travellers spend a lot of time on Yelp and Google reading hotel reviews. In some cases, they read reviews on travel sites. These travel sites offer a booking engine for your hotel and cut down on your profits. Consider offering guests the chance to review your hotel on your website. Lots of tools offer this possibility, we particularly like the Hotels Network (pictured). These reviews can encourage visitors to your hotel website to go ahead and book their stay.

9. Mobile-Friendly Hotel Website Design

For many travellers, smartphones and tablets have taken the place of laptops and desktops. When creating your new hotel website design, you want to make sure it is mobile-friendly. You want to give prospective guests who use their mobile phones the same experience as ones using their desktop computers.

A mobile-friendly version can help with your SEO goals. Google looks for mobile versions of websites when ranking hotel websites. This is a win-win for your bookings and rankings.

10. Make It Easy to Book a Room

You don't want your customers hunting around your website looking for a way to book a room. On every page of your website, it's a good idea to include an embedded link for making a reservation. This link might appear at the top or bottom of the page. Wherever it is, make it obvious.

At JCMT Agency, we understand what it takes to get your luxury hotel website noticed. Furthermore, as a leading hospitality website agency, we possess the knowledge on how to drive your customers to book reservations. When you're ready to start planning your hotel website marketing, contact a hospitality website agency that delivers.