Online Travel Agents (OTAs) have become the norm for consumers and aggregator websites such as bookings.com, Expedia.com and Hotels.com offer price comparison and ease of use. Although, they give hotels the opportunity to fill rooms that would otherwise remain empty, hotels especially independent ones are losing out with commission structures of up to 30%. Travel and tourism remain a highly competitive industry so it is important for independent hotels to establish and maintain a competitive advantage with their marketing efforts and drive direct bookings. Our client Morgan Hotel wanted to reduce the number of bookings made through OTAs so we created an attractive website and crafted a hotel marketing strategy to do exactly that – increase their direct bookings. Over the year Morgan Hotel has seen a 43% increase in sales from the month we launched their website and marketing strategy.
Here’s what we did to increase their direct bookings:
1. Presented an attractive website and told a compelling story
To increase direct bookings, we redesigned Morgan Hotel’s website with the customer in mind. We created an attractive website with detailed images of both the hotel’s rooms and communal areas to let potential customers know what they’re getting for their money. The website also followed an intuitive logical order with a clear call to actions throughout to ensure ease of use. We also carefully created the copy to back up the visual story and made sure the website contained useful and relevant information such as facilities, price and nearby attractions.Check out the website we designed here: Morgan Hotel Website
2. Promoted the website
An important way of staying ahead was to devise an integrated Marketing strategy and create relevant materials to attract potential customers. We used various digital marketing techniques – paid and organic to get the website seen. Our efforts drove a 15% increase in targeted traffic to the website over the year when compared to the month we started. Techniques we used included Search Engine Optimisation, on page and off. We made sure to create quality content and copy on the website using keywords, meta tags, descriptions, and titles. We also made built links to ensure Morgan Hotel was seen organically in the searches. We carefully selected keywords to set up the PPC campaigns in Google AdWords, monitored and optimised them daily. We also drove traffic creating relevant content on social media channels both organically and paid. Lastly, we created direct marketing campaigns and sent targeted emails with special offers and special events to customers who were already interested in the hotel.
We understand that travel and tourism is a highly competitive industry and hotels, especially independent ones need an attractive website and compelling marketing campaigns to attract potential guests. At Captivate Hospitality we’ve developed proven hotel marketing strategies that focus on the user experience, from market research to delivery, website copy to images, and search engine rankings to measurement. Our hotel marketing strategies and techniques drive sales growth – to get ahead of your competitors, please contact Captivate Hospitality and we can help you increase your direct bookings.
