21 Tips To Boost Your Hotel Direct Bookings

I found a great infographic from the guys at NetAffinity in Ireland of 18 tips to boost bookings and revenue.

I totally agree with their findings and experience and added 3 more.

1. Identify who your ideal guests are.
2. What is unique about your property – make it easy for guests to find out.
3. Are you delivering a fast website – people love a speedy site.
4. Showcase great photos in a gallery – images powerfully communicate with our ancient or limbic brain – the part responsible for our primal decision-making.
5. Keep your site simple – less is much more, we are all busy and love simple, well-designed information.
6. Reduce choice – make things easy for people, they will love you for it.
7. Tell authentic stories – image and video storytelling with friendly content connects much stronger with people.
8. Mobile first is a given these days – our smartphones dominate a large portion of our day.
9. Be aware of your stats – spot the trends in your data and fine-tune and deliver what users want.
10. Design beyond templates – custom designing your property is key to showcasing your unique features, facilities and location – in turn, wins you more bookings.
11. Soft sell with pop-ups – gather email data and give out incentives, use automated workflows to engage people digitally.
12. Dive deep into the benefits of the facilities you boast – to connect people with: eg. why your mineral pool will rejuvenate your guests, etc.
13. Use colour well – when promoting special offers, key actions you want users to act on.
14. Clever email marketing – craft your copy and deliver information in appropriate stages, pre-arrival email, post-stay email, short and sweet email newsletters, etc.
15. Retargeting campaigns – ensure you keep front of mind when people visit your site.
16. Get Social – and reap the rewards that your loyal fans and followers will post about you. Encourage them and invite them to come and stay with you on the house. Use influencer marketing to your advantage.
17. Use landing pages – to track specific activities, competitions, promotions, 72hr sales, etc.
18. Test and experiment – all the time with moving things around, monitor the stats as to what is working and do more of these actions ongoing.
19. Display guest reviews – directly on your site (unique content for your site), great for SEO and provides credible word of mouth from past guests.
20. Book Direct – ensure you make it very clear to your guests that they will get the best rates and service guaranteed when they book direct with your hotel.
21. Display some form of cost per night or package – to make it easy for people to know ballpark costing rather than having to go into the booking engine.

The guys at NetAffinity have done a great job on this infographic and from my 18 years of experience in the hospitality industry of building websites and online marketing, I fully agree with all 18 of their infographic items.

View the NetAffinity infographic here.

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