Industry
Websites for hotels, guesthouses and rentals
A hotel without its own booking channel is a tenant in somebody else shop. The guests arrive, the commission is paid, and when the same guest wants to come back they go through the platform again, because there is nowhere else to go. The job of this site is to take part of that flow back.
What decides whether they get in touch
- Direct booking with real availability and a real price, not a form answered the next morning
- A page per room type with photographs that load before the guest gives up
- The languages your guests actually speak, rather than every language available
- A reason to book direct, since price alone is usually not one you are allowed to use
Rate parity limits what you can promise
Contracts with booking platforms usually forbid publishing a lower rate than theirs. So the direct advantage has to be built from something else, such as a later checkout, parking, or breakfast included. Before anything is announced on the site, the contract gets read.
What is usually wrong
A gallery of forty photographs at three megabytes each. It looks fine on the hotel wifi, and the guest checking from a phone on the way to the airport closes it before the first room appears.
How you know it works
Measured by the share of direct bookings against platform bookings, month by month. A few points of difference show up immediately, because the commission is not small.
Related
What to write so I can answer properly
I answer every email myself. If the first one carries the points below, the reply comes back with specifics and a price rather than with questions.
- What the business is and which country it operates in
- What you need, meaning services, a catalogue, a store or bookings
- What the goal is, meaning more enquiries, more orders or better visibility
- Whether a site exists today and what does not work about it
- When you need it live