Is the hotel website up to par with today's online user expectations?
Your properties stand-alone website may be due for a re-design or periodical facelift. For example, sometimes your imagery, content and navigation might become a little stale or even out of date.
Ordinarily you would see a website being re-designed every 2-3 years, a hotel website would be no exception. In fact, I would expect to see a hotel continuously updating content in between any major overhauls.
Does the site serve as a platform to establish interactive relationships with your customers?
- Is the site generating incremental revenues and ROI's at and above industry
averages?
- Is it visually attractive and does it convey the richness of the hotel product and the destination?
- Does the website build brand equity or does it tarnish the brand image of the hotel?
Careful consideration of these questions can help hoteliers determine if and when the properties website is due for a re-design. When it's time to re-design you should partner with outside internet marketing and distribution experts. Commission them to audit the website to determine whether you need a new web site or just a facelift to your content or any other features.
If a website re-design is due, you have to budget for the actual look-and-feel re-design, new imagery throughout the site, customer segmentation and copy overhaul, optimization of the keyword density, page titles, descriptions and meta tags.
