Ten great tips for B&B websites

Muzi Mohale

The period of static online brochures are over; to stand out from the crowd requires that you maintain an ongoing focused plan for your website to yield the expected results.

Below are ten solutions to make your website impactful.

1. Call to action
   Ensure that your website invites your browsers to make booking enquires. Have a very clear and bold 'Make a Booking Enquiry' form with name, telephone number, email, calendar and description fields. This facility is meant to encourage your website browsers to have easy access to making a booking enquiry.

2. High quality photographs
   Photographs are what sell your property to potential guests online. Therefore it is extremely important that you have recent, high quality photographs of your property showcasing the entire facility. This will give your website visitors a clear understanding on how your property looks, which increases chances of securing a booking. Always remember that your website is meant to attract new bookings; therefore ensure you update your property photographs at least twice a year.

3. Read industry blogs
   Read tourism blogs to learn how other lodging operators use their websites to increase bookings. You cannot afford to ignore industry trends, even if that industry blog is internationally based, you stand to learn and grow your business. Industry focused blogs like www.travelblogexchange.com and www.wiwih.com are great sources of extending your networks and interacting with likeminded people within the same industry sector.

4. Use social media
   Tapping into the social media space increases chances of securing bookings from unlikely sources. Creating an account with www.facebook.com and www.twitter.com should not be ignored, since these websites have a large number of users who could in turn be your guests if used properly. Adding a RSS feed on your website will ensure that all your updates will also be published on both your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

5. Use booking engines
   This is your extra sales force, which is not paid a basic salary, but only commission as per the number of bookings generated per website. For more reasons why you should use a booking engine, see
   www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/423/37864.html.

6. Use guest testimonials
   Add all those positive emails from your happy guests on the website. This promotes goodwill and trust with your potential guests, as there will be encouraged to use your facility after reading happy remarks from your guests that you previously hosted.

7. Use media coverage
   Should you at any stage get coverage from your local newspaper or news website, ensure that you link to that story on your website. Use all the positive news about your bed and breakfast to attract potential guests to your property. You should also use any available opportunity to gain media coverage, ie donate something of value to your local charity/school/church.

8. Use local attractions
   Always ensure that you highlight all tourist attractions in your area, as this will add to activities your visiting guests will enjoy while booked with your B&B. An example would be any B&B in Soweto, could use the recently launched www.orlandotowers.co.za to attract adrenaline junkies into doing bungee jumping in Soweto, the very first such an activity in a township which has great appeal to young travellers.

9. Use instant messaging
   At any given moment, www.skype.com has over 10 million users online. This facility offers free instant messaging and telephone calls to registered users. It is free of charge to download and would enable guests located internationally to call you and make booking enquiries without spending a cent. The only requirement is to download the software on your computer and adding a Skype button on your website. This will also help you reduce your telephone costs drastically.

10. Blog about your facility
    Blogging is a great medium to marketing your business without restrictions. I blog for a living and get to travel on a regular basis around the country and document my travel experiences. I recently travelled to the launch of Route 66 in Zululand and did a post entitled I've discovered Route 66 the Zulu Heritage, have you?. You too can integrate a blog on your B&B website to write about activities in your business. Say you're adding a new guestroom/ swimming pool, you could blog about it. Maintaining a blog will help you retain browsers to your website and increase chances of turning them into guests.

In closing, if you do not have the time or experience in managing your B&B website, I recommend that you consider outsourcing such a responsibility to an experienced company to see the results.

Visit www.travelwires.com for more.