Louis Halpern's View on Internet & Hotel Marketing

The growth of the Chinese tourist is the going to be the biggest change in the tourism industry for a generation.

Britain is on the approved list for China’s tourists. Half a percent of all Chinese tourists already head to the UK for their holidays, that’s over 200,000 people last year, and rising.  Two mid market Chinese hotel groups are sniffing around for acquisitions – according to yesterday’s Sunday Times – to take advantage of this demand. That means it’s time to get on with some hotel marketing basics.

When you see a website in your own language you are immediately more likely to trust it. It shouts that the company values you as a client. Search engines are also all about user experience. If you use a local domain name and the local language they are likely to rank your site more highly too.

Your hotel needs to be positioned to take advantage of this new revenue stream. My hotel marketing tips to do this are:

1. Make a comprehensive version of your website in Chinese. Ideally, replicate the whole website and all the functionality including the booking engine. From an SEO perspective the more content, the better the site will rank. It’s the same for the user experience and therefore conversions.

2. Put the Chinese version of your website on the Chinese URL with your brand name with the .cn domain. If possible get both the English and the best phonetic Chinese character match. Search engines value exact match domain names. Users also get a measure of re-assurance and therefore trust when they see this too.

3. Put a link on every page of you English language website to the Chinese version in Mandarin. This will pass along some of the search engine power of your website to the Chinese versions and help Google and other search engines value your site.

4. Use two translation sources. When we do multi lingual work it’s always best to use one source to originate and a second source to proof read and sense check.

With more than a few years experience in helping Hotel brands optimise their web presence, it still never fails to amaze me just how many hotels and booking agents seem to get it wrong when it comes to website usability. Such a high proportion of the industry’s business is transacted online that you would think that ensuring your website is quick and easy to use would be no-brainer. The reality is, though, that nearly half the websites you visit are a long way of the mark.

My team at Halpern Cowan have started the process of collating our expertise on what exactly makes a the best possible online booking user journey and hotel website. We’re now engaged in a research process asking consumers what puts them off making a booking on a website to add to the knowledge base. We’ve analysed the top hotel and booking sites to see how well they fair from an audience point of view.

The results that we’re seeing paint a fairly consistent picture – for a whole variety of reasons, some of the UK’s major hotel chains are losing business by failing to provide their customers with an optimised online experiences.

There is so much for brands to consider when it comes to developing a website that will have a direct impact on conversions, to name just a few:

• the right message on the landing page

• positioning & accessibility of the search & advanced search functions

• Search Engines results display

• Pricing display

• Booking options

• Login sections

• Purchase information display

• Functionality enabling customers to easily compare different options and change their demands.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The above criteria may seem pretty straightforward on paper but it is amazing how many brands overlook or don’t prioritise the little things which all add up to have a significant impact on their sales.

I will post full details of our Online Hotel Usability Report soon – watch this space…

How do you keep a cool head in the face of an erupting volcano threatening to blow away a client’s bookings?

Around the time of the first Icelandic volcano’s eruption, I was stranded at the St Lucia hotel of one of our clients. They were concerned that through no fault of their own, they could potentially take a massive revenue hit from decreased European bookings, as these customers were physically barred from traveling to their resort. After listening to their concerns, I recommended that the hotel aggressively target their US and Canadian customer base. We quickly developed a promotion where the hotels offered an aggressive discount for the entire duration of the stay for US and Canadian customers who booked before 30th April, 2010.  This way, the resorts could increase the hotels’ occupancy levels while also capturing North American holiday makers.

How do you promote a massive deal like this in under two weeks? Aggressively. First, our client’s webmasters created new custom landing pages for both hotels which were only visible to people who clicked on the PPC ads, which were set to be shown only to searchers from the US and Canada. In turn, HC turned the focus of our existing PPC campaign towards creating ads for the promotion. The next step was maximising PPC bidding, to ensure that the ads were constantly visible to the remaining target market – the US and Canadian searchers who were the only customers able to take advantage of the offer. The new promotion specific landing pages pages helped to easily track the level of interest and bookings generated by the campaign.

The result? 5 days into the campaign, the hotels saw a sharp increase in bookings with an ROI of far more than $25 for every dollar spent.  A job well done by the HC team. A great example of working as a team with your client.