Best Hotel Website Tips For 2022

Your hotel website is the face of your brand, and it can have a significant impact on prospective guests' first impressions of your property. Regardless of the size of your property, its location, or the type of lodging you offer, it’s important to have a modern, user-friendly website, that’s, frankly, easy on the eyes.

As you look to refine your brand and increase your visibility in 2022, these hotel website tips can help.

Confirm That You Have a Responsive Hotel Website Design

A responsive hotel website design means your website will adjust its overall design and content to fit a user's screen size and device. It’s an essential feature for your lodging business because this type of intuitive website design lets users experience a crisp, clean, and informative version of your website regardless of the device they are using.

Have you ever found yourself trying to navigate the desktop version of a website from your phone? The squinting, the pinching and zooming, the teeny tiny buttons. We’re guessing these aren’t your fondest memories.

Now imagine this experience from the perspective of a potential guest. If your website causes them this much stress, what will they expect from a stay at your property?

Beyond the guest experience, responsive design can help you improve your search engine ranking. Google now penalizes websites that are not mobile-friendly, so having a responsive design is essential if you want to achieve or maintain a good ranking.

More than 40% of all hotel bookings in 2021 were made on a mobile device — a percentage that has drastically increased just since 2020. To put it simply, you need a responsive design.

Choose a Hotel Website Template With Customizable Features

Hotel operators are not typically website designers, which is why it can benefit you to use a hotel website creator and select a template for your design. In many cases, these templates can easily be customized, allowing you to update your website whenever necessary. As you look to improve your design, remember that simple is best.

Streamline your overall hotel website and focus on including the most valuable features, such as:

• High-resolution images of your property
• Videos that showcase the rooms, the grounds and the amenities
• Reviews from previous guests who have stayed with you
• Chat functionality that provide instant customer support
• Clear calls-to-action for checking availability and booking a reservation

Better yet, we highly recommend you work with a professional website designer. We know it can be a big investment financially, but when you think about the fact that your website acts as a 24/7 employee for your business, you’ll see it’s actually kind of a steal.

For bonus points, look to work with a vendor that specializes in hospitality lodging sites. Their teams bring an incredibly in-depth understanding of the ideal user experience when it comes to travelers looking to make a reservation. They can help make sure your site is optimized for helping people find exactly what they need to to book their stay, resulting in better SEO and more conversions.

Integrate Your Online Booking Engine With Your Website

Following the tips we’ve already discussed will encourage your site visitors to stay on the main hotel website, rather than leaving to look elsewhere. But then what?

Make sure you have an online booking engine that allows you to accept direct bookings on your website, which is a key to managing your overall hotel booking strategy. But, of course, not all booking engines are created equal.

Prospective guests will feel more confident when they are booking directly with you, but you need to make it as easy as possible. Use a prominent call-to-action (CTA) button in a variety of locations throughout your site that takes people there. Include this button, at minimum, in the following places:

• in your header menu
• in your hero image (the larger image usually at the top of your homepage)
• on all of your rooms, amenities, and specials pages
• within your blog posts

As with the rest of your site, you’ll want to make sure your booking engine is mobile-responsive, so it’s simple to use.

Work with a company that understands the value of a seamless experience. For example, with ThinkReservations, we design every single booking engine to match the look and feel of the business website so the guest doesn’t feel like they’ve left for a third-party site.

Confirm that all potential questions can be answered within the booking engine. You don’t want people leaving to go back to your main site once they’re there. In order to accomplish this, you’ll want to be able to have a certain level of customization available to you. Being able to add photos, room details, relevant rates, packages, and upsell items, as well as your unique policies is crucial.

Finally, make sure you’re letting guests book in real-time and walk away with a confirmed reservation. No one wants to deal with submitting a request and then waiting around to find out if it’s accepted. The large majority of people will move on to another property to book online.

Create Engaging and Relatable Content

Your website content plays a significant role in your overall online visibility. One of the best ways to improve your website is to refresh the content that is on the page. Your content should be:

• Informative and accurate: The search engine algorithms place a lot of emphasis on high-quality content. Make sure it’s not outdated and check for broken links on a regular basis.

• Interesting and engaging: Your content should mirror the conversational tone of your target market segment. Use words and phrases they’re familiar and comfortable with. It should keep people on your site. Think about more in-depth articles and direct people to additional related content so they stick around.

• Optimized for SEO: Naturally incorporating target keywords into your content can help improve your ranking on the search engine results page. Beware of keyword stuffing, though. This is when you just add keywords to your content for the sake of having it there. Google will notice and penalize you and your site visitors won’t be too impressed either.

In many respects, your hotel website is an extension of your hotel reservation system and overall guest experience. Your prospective guests are going to be visiting your website in hopes of learning more about what your hotel has to offer, the rooms that are available, the amenities that are on-site, and the attractions that are in the area. In 2022, your hotel website should be a top priority, working for your business 24/7 to bring in more ideal guests. Using some of our best hotel website tips can help you optimize your website, increase your site traffic, and improve your conversion rates.

Want to make sure your property management system is up to speed, too? We've got some great articles linked for you here:

• Why is PMS Integration Important for Hotels?
• What's The Best PMS For Small Hotels?
• What is the Difference Between a Hotel PMS and a Channel Manager?