Mobile Website Design Basics: What Every Hotel Needs to Know

Posted on September 7, 2010 in Hospitality & Travel, Mobile Marketing

I strongly encourage hotels to move towards establishing a mobile presence without delay. As with every new adventure in technology, there is a right way and a wrong way of doing things. Here are some points for hotels to consider when taking the mobile leap.

Avoid “Walled Gardens”

Hotels must stay away from “one size fits all” templated solutions. These solutions offered by third party sites are a short-term gimmick to get hotels to sign up and start paying monthly fees to “rent” their mobile websites. Why is this a bad idea?

For those of you old enough to remember the 1999-2000 era, templated websites were all the rage. It was simple: with a few clicks, you got a website and you paid monthly rent. What a scam that was! You didn’t own anything, and you didn’t build any rankings on search engines.

Fast forward to 2010, when everybody owns their website and domain, and nobody in their right mind should ever give up control of their website to someone else. Mobile website template sellers are selling the exact same thing their counterparts did in the past…it’s still a terrible idea! Always insist on developing a fully customized mobile website that you own and control – it’s worth the investment.

Simplicity Rules

Due to the ubiquity of generic hotel internet marketing agencies, hotel websites have largely become a menagerie of heavy flash and high-resolution graphics resulting from the mass produced templates these marketing agencies have forced upon their clients. There is also the super artsy GM, owner and occasional Director or Sales who wants to capture the “spirit” and “experience” of a hotel stay on the hotel’s website.

For successful mobile website design, hotels need to check their design divas at the door. Mobile screens are too small to capture your magnum opus, and speed will always be an issue. Think Google.com home page, not Yahoo.com, and you will be successful…unless you want your hotel to be the Yahoo of the mobile world.

Phone Number Is a Must

If you do not have a prominent phone number listed on your mobile website, you have failed. This is like buying a shiny new car without a steering wheel. It simply has to STOP. Always provide your mobile website visitor with a  “click to call” option. Often, mobile users are on the road looking for quick contact information; never frustrate your guests by withholding it.

Color It Simple

Not leaving white space on your mobile website is extremely frustrating to users. The small screen size makes the lack of white space a factor in turning off visitors. Navigation needs to be in clear and easy-to-see colors. Funky color schemes that look great on a laptop browser can just be confusing on a mobile phone screen. Good contrast is key in making your mobile content appetizing for consumption on a mobile device.

Targeted Content

The mobile website visitor is looking for content that can be consumed efficiently and without having to click too deeply into your website. Effective mobile websites prioritize the content mobile users need to find quickly, eg, Contact and Location, Rooms, Rates. They don’t try to tell epic stories – save the long version for your non-mobile site. Keep it to the point, and your mobile website will do great.

Videos & Images

As a rule of thumb, omit these items. Mobile broadband speeds in the US really do not permit anything fancy to play. Your prime focus should be on giving the visitor the immediate information they need.

Simple Navigation

Simple navigation is a must on a hotel mobile website. Clicking is hard on a mobile device, and burying information under multiple layers is bound to frustrate your visitors.

Mobile Friendly Booking Engine

Hotel booking engine technology is constantly playing catch-up to the real world. Mobile websites that do not let your guests book a room will deprive your hotel of direct mobile revenue. There are some creative ways to bypass this issue if you are stuck with a dinosaur hotel booking engine. A “Call Now to Book” or a simple “Request a Room” form can deliver mobile-direct revenue for your hotel.

Mobile web is rapidly converting your guests into avid surfers on their mobile devices. It’s time for you to get serious and invest in the right mobile website for your hotel. Follow the basics I have listed, and you’ll be off to a good start!

Hotels Need to Get Realistic About Their PPC Investment Strategy & ROI Expectations

Posted on February 2, 2010 in Hospitality & Travel, Search Marketing

ROIHotels and pay per click (PPC) marketing is a topic I know very well. I have dealt with some very interesting scenarios over the past several years, and have seen the industry go through many ups and downs. Here is a recap of the hotel/PPC story so far, as well some tips on the best way for hotels to stay actively involved with PPC marketing.

History

The early adopter hotels who started doing PPC for themselves in the early part of the decade probably saw some of the best ROI in the industry. The majority of hotels back then were not interested in the whole Google/Yahoo PPC “fad.” As a result, those who showed up harvested the clicks and guests at an amazing pace. It was not unusual for hotels to be booking 49 to 59 of revenue per 1 dollar spent on PPC! It was the golden age of PPC marketing for hotels.

Fast forward now to the end of the decade: competition is stiff, OTAs (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz) spend huge amounts of cash on PPC, Yahoo has slacked off, free rankings are hard to come by, and booking engines for hotels have not kept up with the times. But it’s not all bad news – hotels doing PPC the right way are still doing great.

PPC has also evolved from a revenue gimmick into a brand-building and testing tool which, used properly, can really help you drive online revenue. Hotels that get into PPC as a fad never stay on. It’s got to be a long-term strategy. Even if ROI numbers aren’t all that golden brown, PPC is something that hotels just have to do. Especially now that Google has emerged as the leader in travel search and is making it hard for hotels to rank for free (organically) for a vast array of broad keyword terms.

OTAs rode the PPC wave all the way to the bank and currently run some of the best PPC campaigns out there. Hotel brands have tried to catch up, but they just don’t get it. And this is where we are right now. Strong OTA presence, Clueless Hotel Brands, and Independents duking it out for precious Google clicks.

The Mis-selling of Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay per click traditionally has been sold (and is still sold today) the wrong way by hotel internet marketing agencies. The ROI promises were way too short-sighted; overinflated ROI predictions never work. Hotels were taught to invest in PPC only if they were seeing a “10:1 to 500:1″ return per dollar invested. This propagated the “only invest in PPC if there is a spectacular ROI” culture. With the downturn in ROI and increase in competition over the years, hotels have started to look too hard at their PPC  ad spend. Campaigns were slashed and burned at an amazing rate. PPC has become the most frequent first victim of a marketing budget cutback. I have seen hotels pull the plug on so many successful PPC campaigns… Oh, the horror!

In my past life as a sales director for some of those hotel internet marketing agencies, I always resisted the temptation to blurt out “25:1, 1000:1 ROI!” to prospective clients. I knew the campaign ROI (2002-2005 era) was going to be nothing short of spectacular for hotels. There was very little competition  in major markets, but I resisted selling PPC as the magic pill. I sold it as a great investment in your hotel marketing program. I sold it as a great tool for testing your website and building your hotel brand online. I continue to stick to my approach.

Hotel PPC Tracking Blues

Tracking PPC for the hospitality and travel sector has always been a problem. Several factors make it very hard to determine the true ROI of a hotel PPC campaign.

First and foremost, the booking engine technology offered to hotels is primitive and not geared towards PPC tracking. Hotel booking engines have made it notoriously hard for hotels to be able to accurately track conversions from PPC.

The way people use web browsers has also changed over the years.Web browsers are getting privacy conscious. Stealth modes are now offered by all of the leading web browsers, like Firefox, IE8, etc.

Finally, people researching online might discover the hotel via PPC but end up booking their reservations on the phone. Or they may book online several weeks after clicking the PPC ad, making it hard to connect the two events.

Reality Check for Hotel Managers

Hotel managers need to start looking beyond the instant and trackable ROI that they can measure right away. A PPC campaign in today’s extremely competitive environment takes over 3 months to fully mature and generate traction on the search engine results pages. There is no instant, “magical” solution to getting a solid campaign in place for your hotels.

PPC is not just an add-on thing to do anymore. It is not just a source of incremental revenue or the magical solution to increasing revenue. It’s not expendable. PPC is crucial, as Google is making it harder for your hotel to rank organically (free) for broad keywords. Also, if you are not bidding on your hotel brand name, OTAs like Expedia and Bookings.com are going to do it and happily take away brand name traffic/reservations from your hotel website.

Simple steps for survival in the hotel PPC landscape:

1. If you don’t do any PPC, start today and at least cover the basics (your name, location keywords).

2. Stop losing your mind trying to figure out the 100% exact ROI. PPC is delivering hotel revenue in ways that cannot always be accurately measured.

3. Focus on how you can use PPC to improve your website’s performance. Implemented the right way, a campaign will tell you what is good/bad about your website. Use PPC to find out when you are right; learn and correct quickly when you are wrong. Rinse, lather, repeat for online marketing success.

4. Demand better tracking technology from your booking engine providers (brand and independent). They are selling you advertising, not innovations! Then think hard before pulling the plug on your PPC campaign because you didn’t see “ROI” in bookings.

5. Work with the right people. You will know who they are. (hint: it’s not an agency with hundreds of clients or the one with the sales guy shouting “We deliver 1000:1 ROI.”

In this competitive landscape, things are changing quickly. Hotels are already late to the party. It’s time to start getting proactive and realistic about search engine marketing. Stop getting blindsided by advertising and hype. Use PPC as a billboard and as a testing tool for your marketing initiatives. Use the power of PPC to help your hotel run a solid online marketing program!

Evisionary’s Top 10 Posts in 2009: Did You Catch Them All?

Posted on December 27, 2009 in Analytics, Hospitality & Travel, Online Branding, Search Engine News, Search Marketing, Website Design & Usability

With 2009 coming to an end, it’s a good time to round up the top 10 posts of the year. Here are the posts that were most read, discussed, and emailed in ’09:

  1. If Your Hotel Booking Engine Sucks… It’s Time to Wake Up!
  2. Google Analytics vs. Omniture
  3. Using Facebook Business Pages to Promote Your Brand
  4. Google Brand Update 2009: Vince Flushes the Cesspool
  5. Top 5 Reasons Not to Put Music on Your Website
  6. Top 10 Ways to Boost User Confidence in Your Website
  7. The End of the SEO Rankings Era, aka The Rise of the Universal-Social-Mobile Search Trinity
  8. Social Media Disaster Aversion Program (How Not to Ruin Your Reputation)
  9. Top 10 Funny Blunders From Multilingual Marketing Campaigns 
  10. Reasons Not to Have Your Website Designed in Flash

We plan to send some awesome content your way in 2010, so stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

Google Making It Harder for Hotels to Rank Organically

Posted on November 29, 2009 in Hospitality & Travel, Search Marketing

Barriers to Hotel SEO

We are noticing a new trend with some of the high-volume, competitive keyword searches for hotel locations.

  • Organic listings have been pushed down by PPC and map listings for the majority of the competitive, city-based keyword searches like “hotels in new york,” “hotels in las vegas,” hotels in San Francisco,” etc.
  • Online travel agents and affiliate programs are dominating Page 1 results. The brand update (AKA “Vince Update“) that I talked about here in previous posts seems not to have benefited hotels.
  • Results may vary for different cities. But for a search like “hotels in london,” at least a few more hotel websites need to show up.

Here’s a diagram of the SERP (search engine results page) for the keyword phrase “hotels in london.”

GoogleHotelSEO

It’s not like London has any shortage of big brand hotels. Marriott, Hilton, Starwood and Intercontinental run some pretty big, star-rated and centrally located hotels in the London area. Why is it that none of them are ranking organically?

London nights.com, Expedia.co.uk, Tripadvisor.com, Booking.com, and Londonhotels.com are all resellers of rooms. They are websites, and not actual physical hotels; in my opinion, actual hotel websites should be ranking higher for a location-based term like “hotels in london.”

Why is Google serving these results?

What happens when you don’t rank, but you want visitors for the highly competitive keywords to find you? You buy keywords from Google! In the example above, Crown Plaza and Radisson Hotel are buying PPC ads to be there. So we understand that Google, like any business, wants to increase their revenue (which means selling more ads).

However,Google has achieved their dominant position by delivering relevant results. If they improve their SERPs by showing actual hotels for location-based searches, I believe this will benefit both hotels and searchers.

If Your Hotel Booking Engine sucks…It’s Time to Wake Up!

Posted on April 29, 2009 in Hospitality & Travel, Website Design & Usability

systemfailure1I have always been close to the hospitality sector. As many of you know, I started my career there. After moving to the hyper-competitive world of search engine marketing, I quickly noticed that other sectors of the economy are VERY serious about their revenue delivery machines, aka shopping carts.

However, years later, the hospitality sector continues to suffer from apathy when it comes to their own booking engines. Here are some of the top booking engine issues that plague hotels today:

Cannot Track PPC

Really? Its 2009, and still the majority of booking engines don’t let you track PPC revenue. This issue stems from a total disregard for the hotel owners and marketers who are spending marketing dollars on Google. Can you imagine how hard it is for a marketing agency to discuss a Google campaign with an owner when they can’t track ROI? Booking engines that cannot provide this capability should be fired by hotels right away.

Failure to Communicate

Many PMS companies trap hotels into using primitive add-on booking engines that connect with their product. (PMS = property management system used by the front desk to manage guests.) Hotels end up using these booking engines because they simplify operations: reservation information is delivered directly to the PMS at the front desk. My question is: Why should hotels  be made to choose between convenience and revenue?

Losing money online in the name of “connectivity” is a sad way to run a hotel. Charging hotels thousands of dollars to provide PMS connectivity is a sham. Logic check: When a hotel buys a PMS, the PMS guys should know that there is this thing called internet that will send reservations to the system.  Same goes for the booking engine champs. You know that a hotel cannot manage guests without a PMS, so please get moving on connectivity. This lack of communication has got to stop.

Dismal Reports and Usability

Adding insult to injury, some of the booking engine reports I have seen over the years have been shocking. Usability “improvements” touted by some of the hotel booking engine companies can be likened to putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. Useful data is not an oxymoron… PPC stats, Bounce Rates, Denials, etc, are essential  for making long-term marketing and ROI projections. If your booking engine does not give you custom reporting, or if  it takes more than 4 clicks to book a room…it’s time to move on!

Flash + One Screen = Shiny!

In the last 2 years, hotel have been seduced by new, shiny, one-screen flash booking engines. But I have always insisted that it’s better to emulate the successful kids than the cool kids. Look at Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. They sell more room nights that any hotel brand. Have they switched to a flashy one-page booking engine? Ask yourself why not… Simple answer: it’s all about usability. These online giants spend millions on website usability… the multistep booking engine has to do with getting progressive agreement from a guest who is about to book. So follow the leaders, or lose yourself in the shiny collateral your booking engine vendor sent you!

Booking Fees

Why are you sharing your revenue with your booking engine vendor?

This is my biggest issue with booking engines. Owners own the hotel, run it, and pay for marketing, yet hotel booking engines out there are asking for a booking fee ranging from 2%-8%. Someone call the cops! Most of the shopping cart solutions I’ve worked with in retail have had phenomenal tracking, usability, and the ability to move thousands of different products online… BUT they offer flat fees. Hotels, stop bleeding revenue and switch to a flat fee system. Nobody should be taking a piece of your revenue when all they have done is give you a piece of software. If the retail industry can enjoy the benefits of robust shopping carts minus the booking fees, why not hotels?

But wait… there is hope!

Someday the open source revolution will hit the hotel sector bringing with it a wave of relief. Hotel booking engines and PMS systems need to stop overcomplicating things and move into the new age of web usability. There should be a bug-free open source interface between the hotel PMS and all the booking engines out there. This advance will save hotels millions of dollars in “booking fees” and “connectivity fees” and give them real freedom to choose the systems they like best.

Coding a decent booking engine is not rocket science (I have confirmed this with numerous rocket scientists), so let’s stop pretending that it’s too hard to give hotels what they want.

Hotels owners: be selective, and ask your vendors the hard questions. Booking engine companies: get off your commission-hogging behinds and start investing in better technology. Let’s make this internet thing work as well for hotels as it has worked for other sectors, and stop treating them like second class web citizens.