For a long-time now I am concerned about how much control Irish hotels have in their own Ecomm strategy. It has to be said there a widespread lack on knowledge by many hotels of some basics.
Your own website
Do you own your own website? Are you sure?
You get a web developer to build a new website. You pay the money so you own the site? Not necessarily. While most developers are great I am seeing more & more cases of hotels not owning their own sites after paying for the site build. There are some big web companies that engage in this. Not naming names. Well not yet anyway.
Make sure before any money is passed over that you agree that you own the site and the keys to the site are passed to you once the site is built. What does this mean?
If you do not own the site then you will be 100% tied to the person who has built it. Any changes will have to be done by them at a price you will have to agree with them. If you own the site & have the keys you can move to another web developer if you are not happy with the service or price you are getting. Hopefully you will have a good relationship with your site developer. I am coming across to many cases where hotels are been held to ransom.
Cost Per Click
Again I am seeing a massive amount of hotels that use Cost Per Click campaigns & don’t have access to the stats. It is your money so your campaign so your stats.
SEO
If you have someone doing SEO work make sure you get a regular report that you can see how your are moving up the pages (or not)
Google Analytics
As a consultant I come across some weird stuff. One of the weirdest is when I ask a hotel for Google analytics access. Sometimes the person from outside the hotel that has to give access will ask why the hotels ask for this. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Why? Because it is the hotels stats that’s why. I always ask why you don’t you want to give it?
Hotels get in control of your information. If you get resistance to any of the above then you need to ask why. The answer may be very easy to work out.
4 Responses to “Irish Hotels be in control of your Website & stats”
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A good one to add to this is that hotels or resorts who have a foreign target market but don’t make content available in their language or even go as far to setup a site in their country are really ignoring a golden opportunity.
Good point David. What I am seeing in the industry worrys me. Hotels dont have control of their own web stuff and can take an age to get things done if the outside company feel there is nothing in it for them
I’m not technically minded but through experience I’ve found that a way to avoid extra costs is to buy a CMS (central management system) at the time when you’re building the site. A CMS allows you to write the content yourself and will generally let you change approx 90 of what you see on your site. The other 10% is layout and graphics.
For hotels with ever changing offers it’s a helpful facility which gives you the capacity to be competitive and innovative; if you market an offer that doesn’t sell you can replace it immediately and without cost.
Hi Susan,
I think you are dead right and I am going with a 100% easy to change CMS. I think Hotels have been charged to much by some people to do minor changes to their site.
Pat