On-Line Hotels:
Are You Ready to Welcome the World?
The World Wide Web has exploded into the business
world in the last eighteen months. Growth of consumers using the web has been
phenomenal, doubling every six months by some
estimates. Businesses have seized the unique marketing opportunities afforded
by the medium in growing numbers. In the hotel industry, international giants
and family owned bed & breakfasts alike have used the web as a tool to
gather information and reach an unduplicable body of potential customers.
Days Inn’s corporate website (www.daysinn.com)
serves as a prime example of what a well organized site can accomplish. With a
range of functions including an on-line reservation system, a hotel locator
service, contests, customer feedback, and a franchisee rating system, the site
performs an easy to use value added service. Not incidentally, it also provides
potential customers with the opportunity to act immediately to purchase
services.
Companies without Days Inn’s deep pockets can
still reap enormous benefits from the web. Ashbury Suites & Inns / LHS
provides press releases and franchise information at their inexpensive, low
maintenance website. Budget Host International’s site (budgethost.com) presents
information about their chain, an email address, and telephone and fax numbers
for potential customers to act upon.
The Internet is not a traditional medium, and
success on it depends less on an exhaustive advertising budget than intelligent
decision making. A small franchise without the resources for national
television advertising can reach a national—and international—audience with a
well focused Internet campaign for a fraction of the price tag attached to
traditional media campaigns.
The core to Internet marketing is, of course, the
website. At its simplest, a website displays information accessible by web
browsers. At the least the site provides contact information so that interested
viewers can take steps to learn more about the company. More effective sites
invite potential customers to take immediate action, such as placing reservations
or providing information.
Any decision to form a corporate website is at
its root a marketing decision. As a result, the site should complement
traditional marketing efforts, much as print advertising complements a
television ad campaign. Materials should be adjusted to fit the unique medium
of the web, but they shouldn’t stand alone. By the same token, measures
launched over the corporate website, such as contests or information gathering
efforts, must be supported off-line.
Joining the on-line community can be as simple or
as involved as the marketing campaign the move will support. A site like Budget
Host International’s takes few resources to assemble and is easy to maintain,
while one as comprehensive as Days Inn’s effort involves a full time web
support team to keep the site bug-free and to respond to on-line inquiries. The
answer to your hotel’s needs probably lies somewhere in between the two.
Building a website is easy. We all know people
who manage their own sites in their spare time with little investment of time
or energy. The phenomenal growth of the web is in part the result of the
accessibility of the tools needed to build a site. But while anyone can put
together a set of related links and images for their webpage, it will probably
take professional input to build a site that will take full advantage of the
resources and potential of the web.
Enter the web designer. Just as you would hire an
architect to plan new buildings, use a web designer to develop a site that is
effective for your business. The best way to find the designer that is right
for you is to do what the audience you hope to reach is doing—surf the web.
Look for sites that catch your attention. They should do the things you want
your site to do. As often as not, the designer will have his name and email
address listed somewhere on the site.
If not, contact the site’s webmaster, who will have that information and
will often be happy to supply you with it.
Take the time to get in touch with the designers
that most catch your attention. There’s no need to limit yourself to a local
firm. Most of the work can be done on-line, so use the designer you like,
whether he’s across the country or around the corner. What’s important is that
he can work with you to build the site that meets your goals. Doing that will
require feedback and discussion from both sides: you need to know what can be
reasonably accomplished within your budget and existing systems, and he needs
to understand your marketing objectives.
Your designer will know more about the mechanics
of building and maintaining the site than you will; that’s why you hired him.
But you can provide him with the tools he’ll need to realize the site’s
potential, and to ensure that it is consistent with your company’s image.
Regardless of the size and scope of the site, at a minimum you will want to
supply a brief statement detailing your vision for the site and how it will
interact with your traditional marketing efforts. You should also include brochures,
flyers, rate cards, photos, testimonials, and relevant bios. These will help
your designer come to an understanding of your company’s image and business
style, and provide basic information he’ll need to construct even the simplest
site.
A website can serve a range of purposes, and it
is important that the site is designed with clear expectations. For example, a
website might include images and animation, a reservation system, payment
options, links to other sites, forms for collecting information from customers,
access to on-line databases, and contact information for the company. Early
preparation should define the range of functions your site will perform. How
fully can the website be integrated into your existing reservation system? What
services can be offered on-line? How much manpower can be dedicated to managing
the site once it’s up and running? Who will manage the site? Identifying in
advance the features best suited to your company will save time and money in
preparation and maintenance.
When the designer understands what you expect
from your website, and you understand the realities of meeting those
expectations, the site can be built. Without clear communication in the
pre-design stage, the creation process can take weeks longer than necessary and
add thousands in unnecessary expenses.
The work isn’t over when the last line of code is
written. The site must be hosted, or placed on a web server so that it is
accessible to web browsers. Promoting and maintaining the site can be a full
time effort in itself, or it can be a part time obligation of an existing
staffer. Your designer should be able to provide guidance on the level of
maintenance and promotion appropriate for your site. But as a rule, the more
support and management the site receives, the more effective it will be as a
business tool. Why spend thousands developing the site if you are unwilling to
finance the advertising and maintenance needed to make it work for you? On the
other hand, if you have developed a straightforward site geared towards
providing contact information to be pursued off-line, you can expect your
maintenance and advertising costs for the site to be fairly low. In either
case, including maintenance and advertising for the site in your budget is
necessary to provide a realistic idea of what your site will cost.
Marketing the website should complement off-line
marketing efforts. The simplest step is simply registering the URL (e.g. www.yoursite.com)
with popular search engines like Yahoo! or Excite. But consider promoting the
site through other means. Advertising by placing banner ads on relevant sites
across the World Wide Web, or through more conventional means, is a powerful
tool for building traffic to the site. Just as you publish telephone numbers in
highly visible places, the URL should appear on all flyers, brochures,
advertisements and business cards for your company.
After paying for design, maintenance,
registration, advertising, and possibly additional personnel, you may begin to
wonder why you were interested in forming a corporate website to begin with.
But consider this: the web is the fastest growing medium in the business world,
bar none. The cost for an effective website ranges from one to seventy thousand
dollars. A typical site for a mid-sized company could range between two and ten
thousand dollars. The cost of not having a website is immeasurable.