Does the New Decade Have You Anxious About Your Old Website? - By Anthony Murgio

With the new decade upon us, the year “2010” still seems undeniably futuristic. As kids we pictured 2010 in our heads and imagined the sight of flying cars, floating cities, and digital… well, everything. One thing is apparent as we rush forward to the 20’teens, technology is constantly changing the way we live and conduct business. With innovation all around us, and the recent demand and popularity for cloud computing, it is time to give an honest look at your most direct channel of business – your website. Aside from a striking design and SEO, here are 10 critical website aspects you MUST have to remain a lodging leader in this new decade.

1. Take control of your website content. The days of calling a webmaster to change text and photos are over! You should have the ability to easily edit all the text and photos on your site with as little technical knowledge as it takes to compose an email.

2. Your website must have updated and accurate rates and availability. This is absolutely essential. If someone is misquoted or double books they will lose faith in your company and may never book with you again. This goes without saying if you don’t have rates and availability you can forget about online revenues. Managing inventory on multiple channels? Get with the new decade and connect your property data through a feed that updates rates and availability across all channels.

3. Your online booking screens must be seamless and ON YOUR SITE! This is assuming you have the ability to take online bookings, right? If you don’t like pop ups, well it is unanimous. Websites that have reservations screens that “pop up” or use iFrames are literally killing their online business. The search and booking process must be completely seamless or “bye-bye” online conversions.

4. Use only a legitimate and credible online review source. I got news for you; I don’t believe that homemade review and neither does the consumer. Let’s face it; reviews are only as good as the source. Integrate a seamless feed for a leading provider like FlipKey that only allows a review after a guest has actually stayed. And don’t worry about the one bad review! I speak with lodging providers all the time that lose sleep over a bad review. Fact is that the bad reviews bring validity to the positive ones.

5. Connect your website with QuickBooks – If you are still manually entering transactions and accounts into a spreadsheet, I can tell you that there are better ways to grow your business. Invest in a system that connects these dots and save yourself tons of time!

6. Connect with the big guys - Orbitz, Expedia, HomeAway… yes, you have heard of them. Want to achieve maximum occupancy? Get your inventory on those channels and watch the reservations pour in. In the years past, managing your inventory on multiple extranets was a huge pain! Software platforms today can distribute your units with real time rates and availability, all with the click of a button.

7. Hold onto your website visitors – Every website visitor brings an opportunity for business. Unfortunately, if you are looking at your traffic to online conversion ratio, you probably realize that 95% of your website visitors simply disappear. You need to develop a minimum of 3 effective ways to capture actionable contact information. I will start you off with the hardest method to achieve this, an online guest reservation.

8. Track website traffic patterns and marketing ROI - Simply put, without tracking your marketing initiatives you are in the dark and likely throwing money out the window. You need to know the traffic and revenues that your SEO, paid search, adverting, email blasts, PR, and neighbor’s blog are bringing you. Let a sophisticated software system do the research and math. All you need to know is what marketing initiatives work.

9. Create and offer specials, discounts, and last minute price breaks – You need to provide a since of urgency. There is available competing inventory right around the corner from you so how do you get a consumer to book with you before checking other places? Build value and create urgency, both of which can be achieved by offing a nice price break on your “few remaining” units. Get them to take action the first time they visit, because they may never return.

10. Process payments online – you simply do not have time to process reservations and run credit cards automatically anymore! This has to be automated, including the receipts, confirmations, and collections of monies due. Connect your booking engine to a payment gateway and then figure out what to do with all your free time.

With the technology available today it will be the lodging companies willing to innovate that will become and remain the market leaders, while managers with antiquated systems will continue to lose listings and guests” says Sam Marks, an online lodging analyst. “The first two months of 2010 have showed the strongest travel trends in over 18 months” he goes onto say. “There is no better time to position yourself for the growing demand for accommodations in your area”. In the past, due to immature technologies and the lack of cloud computing, it was common practice to run different operations of your business through separate and disconnected applications.

Today with platform based software it is possible to tie in a front end website including real time availability, integrated reviews, and online booking, with a backend property management system, content management tools, a robust CRM, and integration to your preferred book keeping application. Brad Luth, the owner of Steamboat Vacation Rentals (a vacation rental company serving Steamboat, Colorado) states that “the real killer application for me is “connectivity”. We are a young company with a smaller staff than most of our competitors. So being able to distribute our inventory from one centralized backend to portals like FlipKey and HomeAway helps us market efficiently by eliminating the need to update information on separate extranets.”

A cloud is hovering over the lodging industry, but fortunately this cloud doesn’t bring rain, sleet or snow. It brings the promise for innovation and connectivity which has and will continue to change the way companies conduct business and store data. Travel and lodging is one of the most competitive industries online, period. Travel websites that are outdated, unconnected, and fall short of consumer expectations will be left behind in this new decade.

Anthony Murgio is the CEO and founder of Bidavilla, a bid based booking portal that represents over 40,000 properties and 500 property managers world-wide. The company also provides turn key, performance based web solutions for property, resort, and hotel managers.