Why Your Hotel Website is Your Most Important Distribution Channel

Though it pays, literally, to distribute your inventory across multiple channels, your property’s own website is your most important booking platform. Eighty percent of vacationers believe that the capability to reserve their complete trip online is critical, and your website gives you the most control out of all your online channels. When a guest books directly through your website, you choose what content they see and what information is gathered from them, whereas third-party channels like OTAs can withhold guest data (plus they charge commission!).

Increasing direct bookings through your property’s website is a key part of a strong distribution strategy that drives profit and strengthens guest loyalty. Here’s how.

To accept direct online bookings at all, you need a booking engine attached to your website and integrated with your property management system (PMS). That way, information is exchanged automatically between the two systems, saving you the hassle of entering website bookings into your PMS manually while reducing errors and overbookings.

Your direct online bookings should be commission free, unlike bookings through third-party channels, which can charge commissions of 30 percent or even higher. If your property management system’s booking engine takes a commission fee, it’s time to switch systems.

Choose a booking engine that’s user friendly on all devices, including mobile. Even users who prefer to complete their booking on desktop may research availability on a mobile device beforehand.

Using your website and online booking engine to collect guest data is crucial to building a strong long-term relationship with the guest. Without it, you cannot personalize service and offers or even communicate with guests prior to and after their stay. For instance, the services and amenities that are important to business travelers aren’t necessarily important to vacationers. Too many irrelevant communications, and you’ll be sent to your guest’s spam folder.

WebRezPro’s booking engine empowers the guest to choose features and amenities they would most enjoy through the ability to sell add-ons with pictures in an on-demand pop-up modal. Guests can also input any special requests or dietary notes. (You will surprise and delight any guest with celiac disease if that chocolate on the pillow is gluten free!)

That said, don’t ask for every detail during the booking process. Making a booking should be as quick and easy as possible. If it’s too complicated, guests are more likely to abandon it.

Collecting the right data leads to a better guest experience and keeps your bottom line healthy. Data is profit. OTAs know this too, which is why they control the data on their own platforms. Entice guests to your platform so that you get the data you need and own the guest relationship from the start.

Enticing guests to your website is important but fruitless if those guests cannot discover it via search engines. Use strong SEO techniques to ensure that your website ranks well. Look at the basics first. Is your website easy to navigate? Is it mobile friendly? Google now uses mobile-first indexing and considers the mobile version of the site to be the primary version. Choose a responsive design that automatically adapts to the user’s device for the best functionality on both mobile and desktop. SEO is more than keywords. It’s about providing a user-centric experience.

That said, keywords are key as well, and with the advent of AI (30 percent of travelers are likely to use it to plan a holiday), conversational, long-tail phrases have gained importance. An FAQ page and blog are effective for expanding the number of relevant keywords that appear on your site.

Once prospective guests have found your website, they need to find your booking engine! It should be accessible whenever the guest decides they’re ready to reserve, which means linking to it from every page. The header is a practical place to put your booking button, where it can be seen but is unobtrusive. It should be in a contrasting (though still brand appropriate) color to stand out.

Clear calls to action facilitate easy reservations. Use phrases like “book now” and “check availability.”

Prospective guests don’t just come straight to your website to book. They research and gather information on your rates, amenities, activities, location, etc. before making that decision. Whether and how easily potential customers can find this information depends on your website design and content organization—if it’s difficult to navigate, you risk the customer turning elsewhere.

Use a familiar menu style and limit the primary menu options to the most important information. Make sure that page and content labelling is accurate. An FAQ page is a valuable addition and saves your staff time fielding inquiries. However, your contact details should always be accurate and readily available for when customers need offline clarification from staff.

Your online booking engine should showcase your very best packages and offers. Although you have to work within rate parity clauses, you are allowed to provide special deals to certain customers, i.e., loyalty members, or create packages for direct bookers only.

WebRezPro allows you to restrict certain rate types to your online booking engine, and guests can use various filters to search for their perfect room. It’s also possible to create customizable amenity filters. You aren’t limited to preset options and can showcase any especially appealing features.

Strong visuals draw potential customers to both your website and online booking engine. People can interpret images within 13 milliseconds and draw conclusions from them, making images a critical part of your marketing strategy. Use hero images, slideshow galleries, in-content photos, and videos to support the topic of each web page and tell your property’s story.

As for your booking engine, it should present photo slideshows of every unit type, showing various features, including the bathroom. These photos give your property credibility and should be of professional quality to reassure guests and really sell your rooms.

With WebRezPro, you can upload up to 16 images for each unit type and customize the booking engine’s main background image. You can even set photos to display seasonally to automatically swap out those snow pics for summer bookings!

Sixty-three percent of American credit card holders have dealt with fraud, and potential customers will not book with you if they do not feel safe giving their payment information.

To start with, ensure your website and booking engine is secured with an SSL or TLS certificate so that data exchanged between your website and the user’s browser is encrypted. Protected sites display “https” rather than “http” in the URL, indicating to the guest that the site is secure. In addition, your system for accepting payments should be PCI compliant, which means that it satisfies the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).