Is the hotel brand website hotelier's friend or foe? | By Max Starkov - Hospitality Net

I firmly believe the hotel website is the most underutilized and quite often forgotten hotel asset. Why are we even talking about it today, 27 years after the first booking engine-enabled hotel website was created? There are several reasons for that:

• The website is the hotel’s “digital storefront,” needed to engage and acquire the rapidly growing army of online travel consumers, fully dedicated to the digital world. The hotel website has become the gravitational center of hotelier's efforts to engage, acquire and retain these customers. Any marketing efforts of your hotel today - SEO and content marketing, SEM, social media, display advertising, email marketing, directory listings, etc. - lead the potential customers to your hotel website.
• The hotel website is “the fishing rod” allowing the hotel to fish where the fish are! Today, the average travel consumers spend online almost 7 hours a day: browsing, searching, planning, reading, viewing, entertaining themselves, etc. In comparison, today’s consumers spend only 19 minutes a day on print media (newspapers and magazines). Overall consumers spend more time with digital media than with TV, radio and print media combined (Hootsuite). So naturally, the hotel website and digital marketing is where your hotel should spend your precious marketing dollars and efforts, and not on print brochures and collateral, print ads, direct snail mail, etc.
• The hotel website provides the shortest path to “owning the customer”. “Ownership”...

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