Independent Boutique Hotels Can Compete

With their Big Box Neighbors

By: Neil Salerno, Hotel Marketing Coach April 2005

For many years, small independent hotels suffered from a tilted marketing playing field dominated by their big budget neighbors. When the time came to promote their hotels during lower demand periods, independent hotels had to contend with larger franchised hotels possessing a larger sales talent-base, GDS exposure, and much larger advertising budgets.

The Internet is leveling the sales playing field. It’s the great equalizer because it is affordable for even the smallest of independent hotels. Independent boutique hotels with modest budgets can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their franchised neighbors and get equal exposure to a multitude of travelers through the Internet. 

The return-on-investment, for even a modest Internet sales program, is still high with some careful planning and execution. An investment in site design and promotion need not be financially out-of-reach, if one shops around. There are many savvy independent web site developers, with hotel marketing knowledge, who can build or modify your web site within a modest budget. 

Beware of pretenders offering to design a technically beautiful site, more for their own egos and income, and more web site than you need. The Internet is an advertising medium where content and ease-of-use counts much higher than its overall appearance. 

There is an abundance of beautiful big budget hotel sites which fail to function well because appearance meant more to them than its functionality. Don’t judge a book by its cover. The true measure is what your web site produces in reservations.

Start with a plan. If you already have a site, have an expert review it to check its effectiveness and recommend changes to make it more productive. Often this can be done for a very modest one-time fee. This web site review will then be your road-map for improving room production from your web site. 

Resist the notion that a beautiful intricate web site necessarily out-produces a simple one. There are many sites that simply don’t work well because some techie designer decided to make a work of art instead of a functional site. Egos aside, your site should be evaluated by the number of reservations it produces; plain and simple. 

Search engines judge and rank your site on its functionality, key words, popularity, navigation, copy, external links, links from other sites, and photography. No matter what some so-called experts may say, search engines still don’t favor flash elements. 

There are many hotels out there which have spent $3,000 or more for a very pretty but totally ineffective web site. Frankly, if you have that kind of money to spend, it would be better directed towards the marketing of your site; not its design. 

Your web site is an interactive ad, not unlike a newspaper or magazine ad, and should be designed to showcase your location, facilities, and entertainment in your surrounding area. A web site needs a clear delineation of these elements. Distractions such as morphing pictures, virtual tours, unless they are really unique, and weather links and the like do little to enhance the functionality of your site. 

There are several indicators of poor site and content design. 

• One has to guess where the hotel is located because the site lacks an address on the home page.

• Location is still the most important aspect in hotel selection; yet we still see sites with just an address, your address is just part of your location; location involves much more.

• Very sophisticated and complicated sites with no clear navigation theme. 

• Sites designed with unnecessary flash elements because it looks pretty.

• Sites with no reciprocal links; a free element, but extremely effective.

• Sites which were obviously designed by committee; messages crammed into every square inch of web page.

• Sites without a booking engine; the majority of Internet users want to make real-time reservations. The return on this investment is enormous. 

These are just a few telltale signs of poor design. There are many more; poorly chosen meta tags, no search engine submission, and others. 

For many hoteliers, there are still many misconceptions and mysteries surrounding the effective use of this miraculous tool. For that matter, there is much disagreement among those who work with it daily as well. As with any supplier, seek those who offer a full explanation for everything they propose. 

Find someone who has a genuine caring for the success of your web site and is willing to assume responsibility for room production from your site; not simply its design.

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