360DigitalInfluence

A couple of weeks ago, Hotel Business magazine asked some London marketing folk (myself included) for their advice on what independent British hoteliers should do to survive the credit crunch. Resisting the temptation to say “why, PR of course”, my number one piece of advice was that the independent hotelier needs to sort out his or her web presence first of all.
Having since read some of the much-documented TripAdvisor row this week I thought I’d elaborate on that a little here. Even if the reviews themselves are (finally) being taken with an ever-increasing pinch of salt, TripAdvisor is still a useful directory of hotels and an extremely influential one, too, with some properties receiving 90% of their business through the site. In my view, one of the reasons that TripAdvisor has become so popular is that many small-scale hotels have been extremely slow to sort out their own web presence and TripAdvisor is simply the easiest way to find a property in the place you’re visiting. Nowadays, with people of all ages shopping online for all kinds of things, there’s no way that a hotel without a decent site can compete. If a hotelier doesn’t seem to care about their web presence, it begs the question of what else they don’t care about.
So here are five FREE (or nearly free) things that I think hoteliers should do to improve their presence on TripAdvisor, and on the web in general:

1. First and foremost, it’s amazing how many hotel or B&B websites don’t give much of a clue about what the place is actually like. If you’re not part of a chain, then no one will give you the benefit of the doubt if there aren’t any good photos. They’ll just assume that the rooms will be a 1970s-style nightmare of chintz and nylon sheets. So investing in some good photography (this is my only tip that costs money), a link to Google maps, and clear text explaining the facilities are all essentials. Avoid hyperbole: everyone’s idea of “charming” is a bit different, and by looking at the pictures visitors can decide that for themselves.

2. Offer great service. I carried out a straw poll among my friends and family this weekend and the biggest factor in driving them to write a hotel review is the people who they meet there. A local recommendation of a walk or a pub can make the difference between a good trip and a great one that you just have to tell people about. It works if the hotel is rubbish, too: if a sweet-natured receptionist goes out of her way to sort out an iffy room, then even the most hard-hearted hotel critic will stop short of a total hatchet-job when they come to write a review.

3. Don’t charge guests to log on to your wifi or cable broadband. If a guest has to work or check their emails while they’re with you, it’s just plain mean to use this as a way of sucking a bit more revenue from them. I recently stayed in a lovely hotel in Paris for work, but after typing my Amex details into the wifi log-in page, and paying 5 euros for the 30 seconds that I needed to get online and download a file, I went from being a happy customer to a miserable and bitter critic in the space of five minutes. Lucky for them I didn’t use my remaining 4.5 minutes to go on TripAdvisor to leave a vitriol-laden rant – but having had a look, I can see that someone else did that for me.

4. Make friends with your local, regional and national tourist boards. They have budgets for advertising and PR campaigns which aim to drive users to their own websites, which in turn include directories of accommodation providers. Make the most of the opportunities to include your photos and web details in there, because only the entries with a photo will get a click.

5. Encourage some traffic to your site with some free search engine optimisation, by simply introducing as many key words as you can. If your property is called “Willow Cottage” and is in the Cotswolds, don’t make “Willow Cottage” the title of your page, because no one will be searching for that. Instead, call it “Willow Cottage: boutique Cotswolds hotel”. In the text of the site, list which attractions, towns and villages are near to your hotel, and ensure that all photos are captioned. Expanding on point 4, make sure that everyone who’s anyone in your area has a link from their site to yours – local directories, monuments, national parks, annual arts / sporting events or festivals, airports, prisons (!) …, if your target market might be visiting it, then they need to know about you.