Tuesday 25 August 2015

Integrate Your Online Sales, Distribution & Marketing

Integrate Your Online Sales, Distribution & Marketing –
Hoteliers need to move away from appointing varied marketing companies with little cross-platform communication.
As a hotelier have you ever successfully managed to keep five, six or seven different marketing partners up to speed on all your strategies and initiatives? It’s beyond Herculean – it’s impossible.
By having fewer partners who offer an array of services you can make your life easier and increase productivity at the same time.
These are two of the main benefits of a new breed of integrated Internet Marketing specialists. While hoteliers may think that this is expensive but the truth is it’s probably not much more than what they have budgeted for offline marketing and could actually be less.
The rewards are far greater , you will have the time to do what you are best at doing- Pampering your guest.

We at Dats IT , have it all in one affordable package ,which you can customise to your hotels needs.
Experienced designers to design high impact websites,a state of the art Hotel Booking Engine,a channel manager and a payment gateway to collect your payments instantly!

Whats more- we have a marketing team with more than 15 years of experience as your marketing support team and not as your technical support team! So what are you waiting for? Call us at 09870061166 and we'll manage your marketing while you pamper your guests.

www.dats-it.net

Thursday 20 August 2015

Why do hotel websites sell lesser than the OTA's

My hotelier friends have always ribbed me on the fact that their website sells less than the OTA's .
Besides the fact that (Duh..!!) they spend millions on advertising campaigns and free-bees, not forgetting their world wide tie-ups with travel agents and B2B connections.

So read this little snippet from Dave Spector and see how its done !



Copy These 2 Subtle OTA Booking Secrets by Dave Spector

Besides their massive global resources, online travel agencies (OTAs) rely on a potent and lethal asset to rein in millions of bookings each year: A powerhouse of stealth and strategic marketing tactics that push people to whip out their credit cards and book.

We’re all too familiar with the scenario: 

A traveler uses an OTA to research hotels. She finds your property and is instantly intrigued. She wants to know more, so she heads to your website and likes what she finds. She plugs in her dates, looks at your rates. She mulls it over, going back and forth between the OTA site and yours. Then, books the room with the OTA. 

Besides the obvious price difference, what makes her choose the OTA over you? It’s because OTAs are marketing geniuses, that’s why. They know how to push guests seamlessly through the booking process, giving them more and more reasons to book at every turn. 

The surprising part is that most of their marketing ploys are simple and small, but they pack a ton of persuasive power. The good news is their marketing secrets are easy to replicate on your own site. 

Here are some of the major takeaways:

1. OTAs Idiot-Proof The Booking Process

Admit it. Most hotel booking engines (yours included) are unsightly. They’re cluttered, confusing, and annoying to navigate through. Instead, OTAs are clued-in to user experience and they know how to make it super-simple and intuitive to make a purchase. 

OTA Secret: Once someone selects a hotel on an OTA, some of the onscreen features disappear. This intentional move lessens any buyer distractions and simplifies the process, making it obvious what the next steps are when booking a room. 

Lesson: Cut down the booking engine clutter, pronto. Don’t crowd the screen with multiple offers, promo codes, options, etc. Make the process seamless, pretty even. Customize it to retain as much of your branding colors, fonts, etc as possible. Then, have people – not your own staff members — test it out. Booking a room online should be so intuitive that even the most distracted buyer can do it. 

2. They Make People Nervous

OTAs know a thing or too about human emotion and how to cleverly use them to drive people to act. They expertly channel people’s FOMO (fear of missing out), which is that same feeling you get when you find out all of your co-workers went to lunch without you. When initiating a hotel search on Expedia, the first message you’ll see reads: “Hurry! Prices and inventory are limited.” Almost immediately, Expedia tells their customers that time is almost up. So, do it. Do it now. Limited amount of time and rooms drive people to purchase sooner than later.

OTA Secret: To tap into FOMO and push customers to book, they spread out messages throughout the site – from the search results to the booking page – that make people worry that unless they book now, they could be missing out on something good. Next to a hotel, they’ll emplace “Two Rooms Left!” This both creates a sense of urgency and validates that others have already chosen to stay at this property, making people even more confident in their decision. 

Lesson: Add copy to your hotel website design and booking engine that incites FOMO and stresses immediacy: 

Limited time only
Exclusive offer, ends soon
Available to the first 20 guests
While room availability lasts

For a free evaluation of your website & booking engine send us a mail at marketing@dats-it.net or fill out a form on www.dats-it.net

Monday 1 September 2014

Developing Your Website, Keeping in Mind Current Trends


Research and statistics clearly show us that most internet users are increasingly using their mobiles to access internet on the go. With high end smart phones entering the market, internet users find it more convenient to check websites, videos, reviews, make purchases, log into social media websites etc. through their phones. The hospitality and the travel industry especially, have witnessed a significant increase in the number of people using their mobile phones to access websites. These numbers have increased by almost 300 to 400 percent in the past two years. Keeping this growing trend in mind, it becomes imperative for almost all kinds of businesses to make their websites mobile friendly enabling them to tap into this segment of potential customers.

The question is whether to make a site responsive or whether to make a separate mobile site?

Making a site responsive would mean that the page - URL, HTML, images, would all remain the same, but the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) give different commands based on browser width. This is a less expensive solution that enables a single version of a website to auto-adjust and thereby display properly on all devices.

On the other hand a separate mobile site is usually hosted on a subdomain (e.g. m.domain.com) or sometimes a subfolder (e.g. www.domain.com/mobile), but it can also use the same URLs as the desktop website, and simply serve different HTML, called dynamic serving to desktop and mobile visitors based on user agent. If the mobile site uses different URLs, they are often kept parallel with their desktop counterparts (e.g. www.domain.com/first-page and m.domain.com/first-page), which allows for smooth redirects based on user agent. But since it’s a separate set of pages, the options are unlimited. You could choose to have a completely different site structure, in which case the mobile URLs might be necessarily different.

Search engines may or may not be able to find a separate mobile site with a separate URL. Therefore most search engines mostly advocate a one-URL approach for findability and search engine optimization. Also creating a separate mobile site would involve more time, money and effort and is an outdated approach compared to creating a responsive site.

Once the technology to be used has been decided, the next most important aspect is the design and layout. Following are some guidelines towards designing an effective, mobile friendly website.

  • Simplified page designs with large font size, big touchable buttons that are fat-finger-proof are key features towards designing mobile websites.
  • It is very important that the design be in line with the theme of the original website so that internet surfers can identify and relate with the brand, be it through the original website or the mobile website.
  • Surfers who access mobile websites are mostly those who are trying to save time and are accessing information on the go. Therefore it makes sense to highlight contact information, and provide links to maps. This will route potential customers directly to you and help the business increase revenues through the mobile site. On the other hand many internet surfers access mobile websites to pass time. To cater to such surfers, you can add videos or other amusements to keep them engaged.
  • For a good mobile website it is important to prioritize content, as surfers can only see one thing at a time. Therefore limited information that needs to be conveyed should be highlighted while information of lesser importance should be hidden or else it will unnecessarily crowd the mobile site. 
  •  Limit the use of images and do not use heavy images that will take time to load cause this will only frustrate potential customers.
  •  Limit the amount of text users would need to type in using dropdown selections or choices saving your customers the time and effort.
 Applying these tips and an effective use of colours, images and information will ensure a great mobile website that will draw potential customers to your business.