5 Ways Your Hotel or Park Website is Letting You Down

5 Ways Your Hotel or Park Website is Letting You Down

 

Everyone’s had the experience. You’re planning a vacation, you’ve got your dates locked down and then you find the perfect place to stay. You eagerly click onto the property’s website only to be confronted by slow load times, broken links, blank pages, dysfunctional widgets and mobile incompatibility.

These are all examples of a website flunking at its primary purpose. If you’re a small hotel or holiday park owner, it’s worth asking the question, is your website letting you down?

Hubspot has created a great checklist for auditing or launching a new website. For those wishing to dig into the minutiae of a website, this can be an excellent place to place start.

For less tech savvy people who just want simple takeaways, we’ve compiled a list of five of the most common ways that your website may be lacking.

Awareness is the first step to remedy.

Your Website is Not Fast Enough

Attention is scarce these days (and getting scarcer), so there may only be a few seconds to hook visitors. If things are lagging, people will simply move onto the next site. Reducing file and images sizes is one tactic many people use to try to fix this issue.

Your Brand is Unclear

Having a defined brand is important (among other reasons) to appeal to ideal customers and give your business an identity. For many small operators, brands are going to be personal, unique and quirky. Many websites fail to communicate the story of its owner effectively.

Your Content is Not on Point

Back in 1996, Bill Gates famously proclaimed ‘content is king’ and it’s as true now as it was then. Content on too many websites is stale, poorly organised or unhelpful. Fresh content keeps the SEO lifeblood flowing. Some of the most successful sites blend useful content with advertisements, promotions of their amenities/services and local guides that benefit the visitor.

Your Site is Not Mobile-Friendly Enough

As if any reminder were needed, trends tell us that more and more people book travel with their mobile devices. Web sites without a responsive, mobile design or going to let a good number of potential guests slip through the cracks simply by virtue of their poorly performing website. Search engines also now favour mobile searches in their ranking algorithms so failure to appeal to mobile users will have a real impact in terms of SEO as well.

Your Widgets Are Dated or Unhelpful

Many poorly maintained sites have a social media widget spouting tweets from 2011 or a link to a blog with no life. Or perhaps you have a calendar feature added at the footer which ends up being a duplicate next to a booking feature. These type of errors are common and make a big statement about a property. They can easily turn some travellers off.

A website is not something that can be built and forgotten. It’s a living, breathing organism that needs consistent attention. Look at the industry and you’ll see that the most successful owners are those who are constantly evaluating their web design and tweaking things to match the current needs of their business.

Additional reading: 5 Brilliant Small Hotel Websites to be Inspired by

Sources:

1 – Hubspot

2 – Forbes

3 – Medium

4 – Skift