‘In with the new – out with old!’ is a common phrase as the new year approaches. At O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing we believe this is especially true for hotel website design and the traditional ways of marketing.
We believe it is time to reinvent the standard hotel website, and we will begin with a quick comparison of a typical hotel website today, and our ideas of how a website should be for 2010.
A Typical Hotel Website Today:
• designed to promote hotel with emphasis on beautiful photos
• difficult to navigate, too many options, user gets lost
• static, no fresh content supplied
• designed from a template
• no links to social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook
• no blog
• no video
• no division between types of travelers (i.e. leisure, business)
• no calls-to-action
• no incentive for user to supply e-mail
• no reason for user to visit your site again
• no personal profiling
• no personal communication with guest
• no reviews
• not optimized for the search engines
• no analytics in place


