Today, Dave Lemmon shares with us how Redcow Marketing helped The Museum Hotel improve their conversion rate by 100% and achieve a 70% increase in online sales. You can download Dave’s case study in its entirety, below.

The Museum Hotel’s Challenges:

The owner of Wellington NZ’s Museum Hotel – Chris Parkin – wanted…

• More bookings through his hotel’s website, more brand awareness, and more sales.
• To increase his website’s presence and make the most of its visitors.
• To reduce the fees he pays to third party travel sites for bookings, and to encourage guests to book from his website, instead.

Dave suggested they…

• Make better use of the hotel’s booking engine.
• Address usability and testing page enhancements to improve sales.
• Add sales elements on the website to improve the sales funnel, and add new content to the homepage and other vital areas that would enhance engagement.
• Work directly with the hotel’s booking engine provider to improve features.
• Work directly with the reservation staff and manager of the hotel to increase bookings.
• Address the site’s SEO content.
• Redesign the online advertising pay-per-click campaign.

First, they accessed the website’s analytical data to determine how much traffic was coming to the site, what levels of contact were made, what and how many bookings were generated, where people went when they visited, how long they were there, and where they left. All of this information helped to paint a picture of the site’s performance.

Dave reviewed the site for usability issues, friction, and confusion points, then looked for gaps in the website where they could enhance value, and studied the site’s flow of information.

Their major challenge was to make the website more interactive and focused – to get people moving into the booking engine as quickly as possible from the website itself; once there, the likelihood that a booking would be made was very high.

Dave proposed a new layout for the home page, then tried and tested different versions to find which one most effectively raised guests’ engagement levels with the site and booking engine.

The next step was to address the pages that were visited the most – providing feedback to the hotel on what those pages were lacking. They also added new tracking systems to monitor visitors and conversions levels, allowing them to track which parts of the pages people were more interested in, what keyword phrases were bringing in sales and customers, and other valuable information.

Finally, they added clearer navigation to aid the user experience, including new contact forms, maps and directions.

They rolled out these changes over the course of a few months, analyzing and tweaking along the way to enhance the overall package.

Results:

By focusing on both the conversions and the traffic, and creating an alignment between search and usability, business from their online bookings increased – on average – by 20% month-on-month.

[Click Here to Download The Museum Hotel Case Study PDF]

Thanks, Dave!

[Note: This case study was contributed by Fabrice Burtin from Keen - a brand strategy agency based in Bangkok]

The Sukhothai Bangkok has spent 20 years at the pinnacle of the city’s hospitality industry. Its reputation for design and service has led to numerous appearances in travel press “Top Ten” lists, as well as a consistent place at the top of TripAdvisor reviews for Bangkok hotels.

The old website for Sukhothai

The current website was implemented 4 years ago and used a content management system that hotel staff found hard to use. Management felt that while existing, loyal guests were happy to continue using the website, it still needed to generate a larger share of bookings, as well as reflect the new positioning of The Sukhothai brand.

The old site for Sukhothai

The Challenge

The Sukhothai is well known for its unique design, architectural style and amazing service. The challenge was to create a website redesign to reflect all of this, while at the same time significantly increasing ROI.

The Solution

Keen worked with The Sukhothai to give the site a new look and feel, something that felt more modern, but at the same time retained the style and elegance of the brand.

The new website design for The Sukhothai

The website copy was rewritten, driven by visitor behaviour trends that put more emphasis on scanning text rather than reading it.

In addition, all pages contained relevant calls-to-action, giving users an intuitive next step.

Finally the site included a customized booking mask that mirrored the look and feel of the site and linked directly with a new booking engine. Rather than push this booking mask in the face of the visitor, Keen persuaded The Sukhothai to keep it behind a prominent “Book Online” text link. This less forceful sales approach was in keeping with the brand, but did go against common industry practice.

The Results

Within days of the new site going online in October 2010, the team at The Sukhothai could already see a significant increase in both visitor interactions and the number of bookings being made.

The new SEO-friendly structure of the site helped to increase search traffic by more than 50% over three months, maintaining good levels of pages viewed and time spent on the site per visit.

With this new influx of visitors the site saw a 260% increase in entries to the booking engine. Within one month of launch, The Sukhothai was routinely recording double the number of bookings per day (year on year) compared to the old site. By the third month, monthly revenue was already more than double the total cost of the redesign and the site was breaking all previous property records in terms of bookings.

As a footnote, The Sukhothai has decided to follow up on this success by working closely with Keen to drive even more traffic to the site from social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as launching a mobile version of the site too.

Ioanna, a reader from Greece, sends her website for our next makeover.

“Hi! I’m a very loyal fan of your blog, through which I was introduced to a number of useful ideas. I have (shared) ownership of a medium size 2 star seafront hotel in Lixouri, Kefalonia (Cephalonia), Greece…. I would love it if you could review our hotel website…[which] is provided through yearly subscription by a big name in Greek Tourism which also promotes our hotel together with all the other hotels in its system.”

It’s been a few weeks since our last hotel website makeover, so let’s dive right in…

Website Analysis

Read more…

What does a good hotel website look like?

Keith, a reader from Toronto, Canada, sends us his hotel’s website for our next review – and from a marketing perspective, there is a lot of great stuff I see.

Because this is going to be a largely positive review, it’s important I review the guidelines of this series: this hotel is not a client of Gradigio, and this review is not part of any type of sales pitch. The purpose of these reviews is to let us explore hotel internet marketing in a real-world environment.

Website Analysis

(Click image for full size review)

When one of their website visitors clicks one of these buttons, they arrive on a landing page with relevant content…

Click image for full size review

What I like about this website

• They provide relevant messages to each of their core target guest personas
• Contact information is prominent & easy to find (especially the phone number)
• There is usually a next step on each page (important for getting visitors to take action)
• The strong calls to action don’t feel too pushy

What I would add

The website development team did a great job with the design, so I suggest they focus now on building a powerful web presence.

• Base your SEO optimization on hard data. It looks like the website developers have made an attempt at on-page search optimization, but the keywords chosen don’t make sense looking at the results from my research tools. I recommend beginning with the free research tool from Google, and choosing to optimize for words people actually search for.
• Make pages easy to save, share & print. I personally like the widget provided by AddThis.com – which includes all the major functions visitors need to spread your content.
• Add a little more social media integration. Plan a hotel Flickr strategy…and invite your guests to participate. Embed updates from your blog or Twitter updates. A great website is one that is frequently updated with fresh content…and it’s even better when guests help produce that.

Take-away questions for anyone:

1. Am I targeting unique guest personas on my website?
2. What is the basis for my search optimization efforts?
3. Is my page content focused on the reader instead of the hotel?
4. Do my pages have a clear call to action?
5. Once on my website, is it easy for visitors to book a room?

Our next hotel website makeover comes from Chris, a reader from South Africa, and owner of the Whale Cottage Guest Houses. First, a little background information:

• Location:  South Africa
• Property Type: Guest houses
• Number of rooms: 33 rooms across 4 properties
• Price range: R 300-450 pppn (winter); R 490-650 pppn (summer)
• Typical Guests: From the UK, Germany, and South Africa

Website analysis

(Click image for full size review)

What I would change

Unlike the Apple Tree Inn last week, the Whale Cottage Guest Houses have started to build their web presence with a blog and Twitter account. For this reason, my review focused on their homepage – where a makeover is most likely to provide positive results.

Here’s what I recommend changing:

• The heading area – to focus on more useful content
• The navigation – to be simple and intuitive
• The page structure – to eliminate duplication
• The body copy – to explain the benefits of the cottages
• The call to action – to encourage more bookings

It all comes down to two words

Simplify and focus.

Take-away questions for anyone:

1. Is my website concise & intuitive?
2. Is the navigation simple?
3. Is important content “above the fold”?

How would you optimize the Whale Cottage website?

For our first hotel website makeover, we’re going to analyze the Apple Tree Inn in Petoskey, Michigan. As outlined in the series guidelines, I don’t know the owners of this hotel, but I chose them to begin because they are near my summer home and their site is typical of smaller independent hotels of their class.

First, a screenshot of their homepage:

AppleTreeInn.com Homepage

Now some changes I would like to see:

My suggestions (click for full image)

(Side note: I just got my Bamboo Pen Tablet, and am still working on my hand/eye coordination. Apologies if you have trouble reading my writing!)

What needs work on this site

1. Less focus on them, more on the potential guest. It’s the #1 mistake hotel websites make: “Aren’t we beautiful?” Visitors don’t care – they want to find solutions to their needs & desires.
2. More external credibility by adding guest comments, media reviews & any awards won
3. The site lacks focus and a strong call to action: where should a visitor look when she first visits? What action should she take? There is no prominent visual element.
4. There needs to be a way to build relationships with their prospective & best guests – perhaps an email newsletter or blog?
5. The design looks circa 2000-2002 – a fresh design might help

Improving search visibility

As we looked at last week, on-page adjustments should only be one part of a search optimization strategy – but it’s a good place to start:

• Current homepage title: Apple Tree Inn – Petoskey Michigan
  • “Petoskey” and “Michigan” are keywords, but they should focus on showing up in broader searches
  • Current Google ranking for important keywords
    • “petoskey hotel” – [not in first 20 results pages]
    • “petoskey inn” – #12 (on page 2 of results)
    • “petoskey michigan hotels” – #30 (on page 3 of results)
    • “inn petoskey mi” – #3 (good!)
  • Recommended new homepage title: Petoskey Hotel: Apple Tree Inn in Northern Michigan
  • Also, each page on the website needs to have a unique, descriptive title. Right now, they’re all the same.
• Current META description: Apple Tree Inn Overlooking Beautiful Little Traverse Bay, Near Victories Casino
  • Analysis: Not a bad start, but it feels a little forced and over-optimized for search engines. Remember, this is the text people see in web searches. I recommend re-writing to sound more natural and focus on the hotel’s benefits.
• However, this site’s BIGGEST flaw is a lack of content. Most of the pages only have a couple of sentences of text. The Apple Tree Inn needs to publish a lot more useful content that both travel planners and search engines love.

Recommended next steps

1. Completely re-write the website, adding a lot more useful content. Perhaps develop an area guide for the Little Traverse Bay region?
2. Re-design website to focus on the #1 goal for visitors to the site
3. Launch a search visibility improvement campaign
4. Build their web presence in social media sites, starting with Flickr and YouTube

Tell me: how did I do with this review? Did it help you? I think this post concept has potential, but I need your candid feedback to make it good!