Newyork Hotels

About twice a week now I am contacted by a hotel General Manager or Marketing Director who has seen some of the recent research figures for hotel internet revenues that says something like “In 2005 hotel revenues from the internet were 25.0% of all hotel room revenues”.

The conversation very quickly gets to “I’ve just checked my on-line revenues and they are nowhere near that. What can we do?”

Naturally, the first thing I do is look at their web site. Some are visually stunning, especially on a high speed connectionbeautiful “flash” movies (loading, loading, loading), navigation buttons that do pirouettes, musicand usually a mega investment has been made (please give me the name of that sales person, I have some sand that I would like them to sell for me in the Middle East)and barely an extra room night to show for it.

Why? Because the site turns up on page 17 on Google, Yahoo! or MSN when you search for a suitable keyword or phrase (usually “destination + hotel” eg “Sydney hotel” is the most popular search term in most cities).

70-80% of online activity is people searching for somethingall those lost souls who are eager to buy your hotel rooms, if only they could find youin fact in one recent case, when I was searching for the prospective client’s hotel by it’s very own name their web site turned up way back on page 8 of Google. You and I both know that when we search, if it ain’t on pages 1 or 2 or at a pinch page 3, we’re just not going to look furtherand neither does anyone else.

If you retain nothing more from my article please remember this: search engines are blind to images (and deaf if you play music on your site) and especially can’t see “flash” movie files or the text in those fancy navigation buttons (these are images too)a search engine is a code and text driven binary agent that reads written instructions and wordsso without the right code in the “back” of your site and the right text and density of keywords on the “front” pages of your siteyou just won’t turn up in the first few pages of search results.

Don’t get me wrongthere IS a place for great visuals and dynamic, inspiring content AFTER you have got them to your site. The overuse and abuse of these dynamic elements is indeed a hurdle to your search engine results, but once the user has arrived, then you need some “bells and whistles” to convert them into a sale (more about conversion in one of my next articles).

Some web sites I see, even for premium properties, are just dogs that were last updated in 2003 (because every time they want a change their designer charges like a wounded bull); and lots of others are in-between but because the sites are not actively managed, they still don’t turn up in the first few pages.

Believe the research data! With 25% of revenues arriving via online channels and a further 25% being influenced by their online experience but booking via another channel, you just have to get your head into this space. Can you imagine what would happen if you ignored your convention market or stopped dealing with the travel industryas a first step.

Over the next couple of articles I’ll address some of the other questions that I usually ask such as: what e-mail marketing they are doing and how, have they investigated the Pay-per-click options at Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or MSN (coming soon) or how easy is it to book on their site. I’ll also touch on conversion but let’s focus in the short term on driving traffic to your site.

So, what can you do? Invest in the Search Engine Optimisation of you site the art and science of maximising a web site’s ranking in the “natural” Search Engine Results for a key phrase. There is a lot to understand but if you visit our web site you will find some very useful tips and specific things that you can do to optimise your hotel web siteor of course you could give me a call or send me an e-mail and I would be more than happy walk you through the basic principles.

And you know what? I never get calls from hotels that have a smart, well designed but not too “tizzy” site. One that is edited in-house utilising a user-friendly Content Management System. Sites where you can easily navigate around without needing a helmet lamp and pick, that have fresh, recent content and special value-added packages; where you can actually book in real-time through a secure connection and get an instant confirmation. And when you need to make an online enquiry, it is easy and doesn’t ask for my shoe size and twenty other compulsory fields before begrudgingly sending off the data, only for it to take two days for someone to respond

These sites already turn up in the first few pages, offer a great user experience and these hotels actively manage their online presencethey are well on their way to achieving and exceeding those 25.0% of revenues online that the research people are telling usand, pardon the shameful plug but, quite a few of them are our clients!

Keith Paulin is the General Manager of Hotel Marketing Workshop (http://www.hotelmarketingworkshop.com). Like many hotel marketeers in the industry Keith “landed” in hotel sales and marketing after commencing his career in hotel operations. Keith has worked in senior marketing roles both within the industry (Hilton, Regent, Hyatt, Accor) and in other industries (HP, Lion Nathan, Shell) and has formal qualifications in Marketing and Business Management. Hotel Marketing Workshop works with chain and independent hotels delivering tactical, practical hotel marketing strategies at property level that work and, just as importantly, they assist with expert implementation. Keith has a very strong interest in the world of e-commerce, Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing and a clear track record in producing on-line results in hotel internet marketing.

For more information contact:
Keith Paulin
General Manager
Hotel Marketing Workshop

E-mail: contact@hmworkshop.com
W: http://www.hotelmarketingworkshop.com

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If you are in ANY type of tourism business, read this article if you want to
learn the secrets used by this rafting tour operator that yielded them
huge increases in sales and profits in a SUPER competitive
marketplace.

It doesn’t matter if you are a small B&B or promoting an entire country,
this case study we’ll share in two parts will give you a road map of
succes, lower your tourism marketing costs and help you avoid costly
mistakes.

———– Brief history of Company———–

Whitewater Excitement, Inc. (WWE) was founded in 1978 providing river
rafting trips on the South Fork of the American River in Northern
California, 3 hours east of San Francisco. WWE was one of the early
rafting companies in this region without much competition. Over the past
25 years, the area has become very competitive with over forty rafting
companies on the same rivers. WWE business had gone up and down
over the years, trying to move ahead but with little success.

The following is an outline of the major tourism marketing, E-marketing
and communications changes and strategies Adventure Business
Consultants (ABC) planned and managed for the 2003 & 2004 season
and the specific rewards that have been harvested WWE’s efforts.

—- Tourism Marketing Communications Improvements ——

The first and most important step was to modify WWE’s marketing
message (words) to showcase their many years of experience, their
professionalism and thousands of guests they have had. The marketing
message (copy) and graphic changes were made to create higher
consumer confidence, sense of safety and to distinguish them from their
many competitors. WWE also enhanced an existing “5 Star - Satisfaction
Guarantee” program and with a new corresponding “Satisfaction
Guarantee” icon to showcase WWE’s commitment to quality, safety and
customer service.

All the new copy (copy = words) and graphic changes in WWE’s
marketing message were applied to their primary marketing materials:
color brochures and web site, www.WhitewaterExcitement.com. The
strategies outlined below to increase prospects, would have done little
to increase sales, if WWE had not also improved WWE’s marketing
message at the same time.

To help structure their new marketing communications, WWE used the
guide; Tourism Marketing Success http://www.AdventureBizsuccess.com/tourismmarketingbook.php

If your marketing communications addresses the needs and
questions of your prospective visitor quicky and concisely, you’ll get
more more calls and e-mail and you sell more trips.

—————— E-marketing ——————-

Web Sites, Search Engine Optimization, E-newsletters & More

With the intention of earning more targeted and qualified traffic, ABC did
a detailed analysis of the key word phrases most frequently used in top
search engines and directories by prospective river rafters in California.
Seven key word phrases were integrated into the 2/03 launch of a new
river rafting themed web site, California-River-Rafting.net. In spite
of high competition, this site has yielded high ranking and tremendous
traffic. This strategy alone grossed a 24 to 1 return on investment of new
sales in 2003 and 2004.

WWE also created an opt-in (voluntary self-registration) E-mail
newsletter sign up form with automated E-mail address database
acquisition on the web sites. The goal has been to gather as many
qualified prospects as possible to send our HTML formatted E-mail
newsletter “California River Rafting News & Specials”. E-mail sign ups
more then tripled.

E-mail newsletters will allow you to consistently reach out consistently to
prospective clients at a lower cost - all contributing to increased sales. If
you don’t have a opt-in e-newsletter sign up conspicuously on your
website, start one immediately.

Look to Part II for the other strategies successfully implemented by this
California rafting tour operator that has him smiling all the way to the
bank.

Since 1994, Tim Warren, author of Tourism Marketing Success and
founder of Adventure Business Consultants, has helped dozen’s of
ecotourism, adventure travel, nature and cultural tour operators, travel
agents, destinations, tourism associations and boards around the world
with training, consulting and creating exceptional marketing material.
For Free periodic News, tips, tools and specials that you can use to
increase your travel business success. — Tourism Marketing Business
Success - http://www.AdventureBizsuccess.com

800-707-7570

SKYPE: adventureguy

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I’ve always wanted to write a headline like “10 Lessons Guaranteed to Improve”. You see these all the time and they attract an incredible number of readers and eyeballsbut then I almost changed my mind. Usually, when you read through the article you discover that the “lessons” are generally a sales blurb for the company.

Like me a few years ago, I’m sure that what you really want are some very specific tips on what you can do, today, to make your hotel website more prominent in the Search Engine Results Pages (or if you like acronyms, the SERP’s). So, not to disappoint you, here are 8 sure fire, practical things to do including, at the end of this article, a final tip that always produces results.

1 - Make your web site the default for your browser and on all the PC’s at your hotel

Why I hear you ask? So that every time you or one of your team open a browser, you are confronted with your Home Pagewhen was the last time you really looked at your website?. Pretty soon you will begin to get bored with the way it looks or the contentas do your customers! And you will do something about itour research has proven that web sites that regularly update their content do much better in the SERP’s than static sites. Plus, regular visitors to your site will also gain a good impression and sales conversion levels will go up too.

Follow closely with me as we are going to do this NOWOpen your favourite browser, enter your URL (www.yourwebsite.com) in the address bar, click go. Once your web page has loaded, click on Tools at the top of the page, select Internet Options. A dialogue box will open and on the General Tab you should see Home Pagenow click on Use Current (the instructions are very similar for the Firefox browser)your website will now load every time you open a browser. And suddenly its profile has become much more important to you

The other interesting thing that will happen is that your team members will also start to give you suggestions and feedback on your websitethey too will see it every time they open a browser. Many will start to write material or supply images from events that you can include on some sub-pagesand your website will come alive.

2 - Get your competitors to tell you the keywords you need to know

Ahthought that would get your attention. Next, you need to discover the keywords that drive online business in your city or regionthere are a few ways to do this, but here is an easy one. Go to Google or your favourite Search Engine and search for “your destination” and “hotel” (eg New York hotel) and look at the results in the first page. Click on the top one and when the page loads, right click in a clear space on the page. Notepad should open and you will be able to see the code that actually writes the page that you were on.

Somewhere near the top you will see some coding called “title”, “meta name=”keywords” content=, and “meta name=”description” content=unless they have been particularly sneaky, you should be able to see an indication of the words that the webmaster thinks are important to include on the page to enable Search Engines to find it.

Do this for the next three or four sites on the Search Engine listing and you will start to see a pattern emergegreat isn’t it? Don’t you love it when the competition starts telling you how to improve your SERP ranking?

3 - Open a Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing account.
Now that you have some hints as to what your keywords should be, you need to build on this list. We use more sophisticated tools but both Google and Yahoo! Search Marketing have keyword tools that will suggest additional keywords based on the ones you have uncovered so far. Eventually, this account will let you produce ads for the “Sponsored Links” part of their pages (we’ll tell you more in another article)but for now we are just going to utilise their keyword tools.

Go to the Google Home Page for your country. Below the search box click on Advertising Programmes and then click on Google Adwords and then click on the Sign Up Now buttonnow is not the time to chicken out, be brave.

This will be the best $5-10.00 that you have ever spent. You will be stepped through setting up an accountwhen they ask you to enter some keywords, just put in a couple of the ones you have already identified. They will also ask you to build an ad; use your property name as the title, and just say something nice in the following two linesyou won’t be ready to publish yet but you have to go through the motions to get access to the tools.

4 - Start building your own keyword/phrase list
Now click on the Tools or Keyword Tools tabs or buttons and you will be lead through how to find even more keywords based on the ones you already have. Using common sense and some discussion amongst your team and perhaps even a guest or two, build up a list of your preferred 20 keywords/phrases.

5 - Put your keywords in the title area of your website pages
The “title” area of a web page, as the cleverer of you have already discovered, is that blue band at the very top of the screen when a web page is loadedthat’s right, with the white text in it. Search Engines place significant emphasis on the text that they find in the title bar.

Ask your web designer to put some of your keywords in the title of your home page. The most important words at the beginning followed by a nice destinational comment that repeats the destination name and the word hotel a second time (eg San Diego Hotel :: leading luxury hotel in San Diego - The Classique Towers Hotel)do not “stuff” the title full of too many of your keywords or repeat them more than two, or at the most, three times.

Do not start with your property nameif you must put your property name in the title, put it at the end. Search Engines add the most “weight” to the words at the beginning of the title. Now, work you way down your keyword list putting different keywords on different pages, thus creating a different keyword emphasis for each page and add the same keywords into the text on the page.

By the way, did you notice that the title is what most Search Engines display in the SERP’s? That’s also why the title needs to be well written as searchers will judge whether to click on the link based on what they read on screen.

Are you still with me?

6 - Look at your web site statistics EVERY day
Every daythis is one of the easy ones. Wherever your site is being hosted, they are bound to provide you with at least a basic statistical summary of how many visitors you get to your site per day (not hits, visits), how many pages were viewed and other data. This is usually available online with a login.

Make it a habit to log in and view your statistics every time you start your work day. Should your web hosting service not provide statistical data then move your site to one that doesif you are serious about building traffic to your site and online revenues then this is as essential as you knowing last nights results or next months room holdings.

Nearly there

7 - Finding out the number of sites that link to your page
Links to your page from other web sites are like votes for your page. In simple terms, if all other content between your site and another is equal but they have better or more links, the other site will be delivered ahead of yours in the SERP’s. The number, theme relevance and quality of links to your site are given significant weight by the leading Search Engines.

To find out how many links there are to your site currently, go to Google and in the search box type in link:www.yourwebsite.com (for Yahoo! and MSN use linkdomain:www.yourwebsite.com). Do it for all three because you will see a difference in the results. Each Search Engine looks at links differently, hence the variation in the number of Inbound Links displayed.

Whatever the number is, you need to double it over the next six monthsslowly but surely. If you add too many, too quickly the Search Engines get wise and start to dampen the effect of your new links. And please, do not sign up to one of those “We can add 10,000 links to your website in One Day for $29.95!” they add you to crap, spammy sites and your inbox will be full of junk in a day. Plus, even if they do add so many links, it’s likely that the Search Engines will either drop you from their listings or just completely discount the links because rapid link growth is seen as being not “natural”.

So, how do you build links? There are lots of ways but my favourite “in house” way is to pay your Conference and Events team $20 for every client that they get to link to your website. Conference and Event clients are usually pretty happy to link because your site will save them answering a bunch of questions about the venue on their own site. The success rate is about 50.0% so if you have 10 events a week, that’s 5 links from high quality sites per week or 250+ a year. Within a couple of months you will start to see your site moving up the SERP’s. “$20!” I hear you stammer? Make it $50it’s worth many, many times that in terms of SERP rankings and revenues.

Ah ha! I feel a disclaimer coming onthey say that free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it. The elements I have described here barely scratch the surface of what is usually needed to boost you online revenues, but, the way I look at it, it’s a startsomeone very famous once said “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.” welcome to your first 8 steps.

“But Keith, that’s only 7 essentials for building online revenues!” you say! OK, so you think I can’t count, but if you have made it this far, you are now way ahead of 80.0% of hoteliers. Would you like to be in the Top 10.0% of hoteliers and be seriously starting to grow your web revenues past 10, 20 or even 30% of your total revenues? Well, with suitable apologies all round, now is the time for that commercial

8 - Register now for our “Hotel emarketing 101″ workshops.

“Hotel emarketing 101″ is a one-day workshop focussed on Hotel Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, Online Media Options and Hotel Website design, development and construction for building online revenues. With speakers from Hotel Marketing Workshop, Google, Beyond Interactive and Binary Business these essential emarketing workshops will be held in May 2006 in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Visit www.hotelmarketingworkshop.com for a brochure or to register online.

And now that the “commercial” is over, go onstart working your way through this listand start seeing the results.

Keith Paulin is the General Manager of Hotel Marketing Workshop (http://www.hotelmarketingworkshop.com). Like many hotel marketeers in the industry Keith “landed” in hotel sales and marketing after commencing his career in hotel operations. Keith has worked in senior marketing roles both within the industry (Hilton, Regent, Hyatt, Accor) and in other industries (HP, Lion Nathan, Shell) and has formal qualifications in Marketing and Business Management. Hotel Marketing Workshop works with chain and independent hotels delivering tactical, practical hotel marketing strategies at property level that work and, just as importantly, they assist with expert implementation. Keith has a very strong interest in the world of e-commerce, Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing and a clear track record in producing on-line results in hotel internet marketing.

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