Hotels on the web - facts and figures

Few people have bothered to find out (or perhaps they do not want you to know) what you can expect from a hotel Internet site. We have spent time browsing hotels sites and have come up with lots of background data on the subject.

Feel free to dip into these topics to find out more about who visits your site and how they get there

• How do you measure web site visitors - what is a "hit" as against a "visit" as against a "page view"
• Is measuring exact, what are the pitfalls in measuring visitors?
• How many visits does the average hotel site get?
• How do the visitors get to your web site?
• Search engines - which are the important ones?
• How do you get good search engine positioning?
• Referrals from other sites, sometimes called "links". Not all links are of equal value.
• The birth of a hotel web site - an analysis of 10 new hotel web sites that we have initiated this year
• The costs of a web presence - how much need you spend to "be on the Internet"
• What financial return can a hotel expect from having a web site
• Software - you could buy your own software and try doing the job yourself

You gradually build up a picture as to what happens on the Internet and how it effects you. At the end of the day it all comes down to numbers

• You should aim for a minimum of 30 to 40  "unique" visits per day
• That ought to give you 2 to 3 bookings a week
• It is easier to drive traffic to a hotel in an area that people are looking for on search engines (eg "London", "Cotswolds", "Cornwall") than it is to drive traffic to a less popular area ( I haven't tried, but eg Scunthorpe or Basildon)
• you should get twice as many visits from referrals as from search engines
• the skill is in finding referral sites that will send you at least 2 to 3 visits a day rather than that number in a month

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