After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the world has changed. Everyone is approaching a contactless way of work. And the entire process of digitalisation has gained specific momentum.
The travel industry, which came to a standstill, is opening up. But this time, things are different. The travellers would prefer brands over any local service provider. Because, they find brands trustworthy. And a critical need for a company to become a brand is to have a full fledged website. But, our experience says that hospitality businesses do NOT even consider importance of brand website, and avoid having it.
To be honest, I’d skip the thought of visiting a hotel or restaurant that fails to have an online presence. It’s a deal breaker for me. I am always eager to know everything about the place I’m staying or eating at, and a website helps me with it.
This happens with the majority of travellers across the globe.
70% of guests say they rely on website images.
Suffice to say, importance of brand website is undeniable to get guests at your doorstep.
But now you’ll ask, what exactly is a brand website? What is the importance of brand website? I am covering it all in this blog.
Table of contents
What is a brand website in the hospitality industry?
To define in layman terms,
A brand website is a collection of web pages helping you to create a unique identity of your business and share your brand story to your guests and readers. It assists you in connecting with your audience at a deeper level.
You’d be thinking, I already have a Google listing, my hospitality business is listed on all web portals, then why should I invest in a website?
Let me answer that for you,
Why should hospitality businesses have a brand website?
If we consider the importance of brand website, you will find a plethora of reasons to have one. However, I’ll give you the 6 best reasons which will compel you to have one today, or rather, I am giving you 6 compelling benefits of a brand website.
1. Creates Trust Factor with Reliable Information
As I shared earlier, I don’t prefer to book a hotel without a website. Having a website gives credibility to the guest about your hospitality business. Let me explain this with a suitable example.
Say, you are interviewing candidates for the position of General Manager. Now, would you just hire anyone based on their resume or appearance? You won't. Right? Instead, you would check the portfolio, LinkedIn profile, skills, and recommendations to choose the right candidate.
Similarly, having a brand website is like creating your hotel or restaurant’s portfolio on the World Wide Web. It helps customers access the information they can rely on.
Simply put, a website is a digital representation of your business.
Restaurants on the other hand, have unique benefits of having a brand website. There is a well-known saying among chefs,
You eat with your eyes first.
So, adding pictures of tantalizing food dishes on your website is an additional benefit. These pictures will make your customers decide their orders faster.
Studies say that,
Millennials prefer to book hotels via travel agencies, but 52% browse the hotel’s website for more information.
Skift
It conveys that travellers do search for information about your property, and a website increases the probability of winning that booking.
So you see, the benefits of a brand website are endless.
2. Increases Guest Engagement with 24*7 Availability
Ever wondered, why every travel or hospitality website has an inquiry form?
Simple, for travellers to post their queries.
This enables them to generate inquiries, prospective bookings and have a 24*7 availability leading to a better guest engagement.
The hospitality industry is quite dynamic. Every guest has a different question or doubt. Now, it won’t be possible for them to find an answer to those questions on the internet, everytime. So, they fill out an inquiry form. This is most helpful for queries generated when the reservation department is off-duty.
In addition, hotels can display pictures of their property, location, rooms and in-house restaurant to help guests get an idea of what they should expect.
Similarly, for restaurants, listing out an entire digital menu comes in handy. Your customers become aware of your offerings, and they can choose their food accordingly. Be sure to remove unavailable dishes from your website. This helps in avoiding a disappointing situation with customers. Nobody likes the unavailability of cuisine to be the reason for their order getting cancelled or replaced.
Businesses these days, use website chatbots to increase conversions. These chatbots capture the contact details of the visitor, and guide them to make a booking on the website. But the fun fact is, you are getting bookings without even engaging in these scenarios.
3. Encourages Guests To Book Directly with You
Here’s an interesting incident that happened with me. I went for a holiday in the mountains last year and booked my stay from a known OTA. In the evening, the hotel owner was enquiring about our booking details. I was shocked when he informed me about the offer running on his website. I could have saved 1000 bucks if I had booked from the hotel’s website. Since then, I’ve started checking for ongoing offers on the hotel’s website as well.
The point here is, hotels and restaurants these days are trying to list themselves on every booking channel. However, most of them neglect the idea of routing these bookings via their website.
As per the report published by Skift,
More global millennial respondents said they use general travel sites (60%) for hotel bookings than U.S. millennials and 31% said they use hotels’ websites.
Skift
It’s no secret that every platform charges a certain amount for each booking provided to hotels. You can try to reroute some of them via your website. Websites these days have a booking engine and channel manager integrated with them.
On the other hand, the in-house dining restaurants have their restaurant POS integrated with their website. It helps the guests to reserve a table with no hassle. If your restaurant is hosting an event, you can have that promoted and booked via the website as well.
Once you’ve got a fully functional website, you can run promotions such as weekend discounts, festival special offers, early bird concessions and many more on your website. This will encourage your guests to book with you directly or order their next meal from your eatery.
4. Increases Visibility and Brand Recognition
If I say ”Best Hotel / Restaurant in India”, the very first thing that would come to your mind would be a luxury hotel chain or a big restaurant brand. It could be Marriott, Oberoi, Taj, IHG, McDonalds, Starbucks and so on.
But these companies didn’t become a brand overnight. It was a journey of decades. So how did they achieve this?
They created a brand with ultimate guest experience, invested abundant money and efforts, and grew gradually. Guests promoted them, initially offline and now online. Soon they became talk of the town. And the rest is history.
For that reason, a brand website will speak your story and be a building block of your branding and marketing strategies. If done correctly, implementing the right hotel digital marketing strategies for your property’s website will help you in getting increased visibility. It means that you can be in the top search results by performing good SEO. And as simple calculation goes, appearing in top results will positively impact your business.
If you are stressed about the expenses, don’t be! A website is lighter on the pocket than social media marketing.
5. Earns you High ROI
As a hospitality business owner, you are quite cautious with your expenses. We all know, a major chunk of your revenue gets exhausted in marketing and promotions. Travel agent commission, running specific promotions on OTAs, maintaining social media pages are to name a few.
But do you know, having a website costs way less than other online promotional activities? Yes, it is true.
However, there is one biggest myth about websites, that creating a website is costly. In reality, it is not.
Website builders, such as eZee Panorama help you create your website with zero experience and technical know-how.
Once made, all you’ve to do is keep updating it with content. This could include travel blogs, articles on local attractions, new cuisines you are trying, guest testimonials, highlights of your property, and so on.
A website helps hotels in generating direct bookings. There are nominal payment gateway charges levied for every booking made on your website. But it’s a win-win situation. It still saves you from paying a hefty commission to travel sites.
And, if your restaurant has an option of home delivery, having a website is a must for you. Like hotels, you also can avoid the charges levied by food delivery apps to some extent. And, utilize it to provide your customers with exclusive offers.
6. Increases your Guest Influx
Regardless of direct bookings or not, a brand website becomes the foundation of each of your bookings. Your guests identify and connect with you through your website and the information you share on it.
After this pandemic, many hospitality businesses have got themselves certified for ‘Best Safety’. Highlight your safety measures in a video and share it on your website. It would create faith amongst your guests to place an order.
Suffice to say, a website improves your guest influx by a large extent.
I am sure, the reasons I gave establish enough importance of brand website.
In conclusion
I would say that not having a brand website is like having all ingredients of the recipe, but no fire to cook. The services and facilities of your hotel are the ingredients. A website is a fire, it helps spread the aroma of your qualities among people.
The ones attracted to it will be your potential guests. All you need to do is, take a leap of faith and ignite a spark to light that fire.