A website is more than just an online brochure. It's your 24/7 front desk, your international billboard, and an interactive storybook that entices guests from all corners of the globe to come and stay. Let's dig in.

Here's a quick preview of what we're going to cover in this video. Firstly, we'll do a quick definition to work with going forward. Then we'll run through a few key words to know, and we'll follow this up with a few statistics to give you some context, which potentially sounds boring, but it won't be, I swear. Context is king. Nothing boring about increased revenue. My old dad used to say Amen to that.

Then we'll get to the reasons you absolutely need a website. I'm sure most of you do know you need a website. Why else would you be here today? But there is definitely some interesting things to learn by asking why? In this case, to illustrate this more clearly for a finish, we'll run a comparison between a website and a shop. And find some interesting nuggets of information in that little exercise too.

Okay, he's still with me. Excellent. So the obvious, easy and logical. First, what is a website? Here's a quick definition to run with. Let's go for the boring but no less true definition first. Our website is a group of World Wide Web pages, usually containing hyperlinks to each other and made available online by an individual, a company, an educational institute, a government, or some other such organisation.

That might make sense for some of you, but I reckon it could just as easily be confusing for others. Either way, I'm going to rephrase it slightly. Simple as this. Every time you go on the internet, you're on a website. You name it facebook.com, google.com, your Hotels.com, Booking.com, they're all at the end of the day websites. The internet is composed of different websites, and each website is composed of web pages. And, That's it for the basics.

Now obviously eventually we're going to want to focus on your website, the one you were planning to revamp or create thanks to this training. When we're done, your website is going to be your door to the world. So it's important that we get this right. Because here's the thing, guys, without a website, you do not exist in the direct bookings Galaxy. I know it's not a Galaxy I made up. It's real and it's the most important galaxy for hoteliers. If you buckle up and follow me, I will get you there.

And I don't want this galaxy to be one. A long, long time ago and far, far away for you. I want you to be at the centre of it. Okay? And for those of you who got that reference. May the force be with you.

So one other thing I want to draw your attention to is the fact that a website is a collection of pages. You can think of it as a book. The goal is to tell a story that will allow you to convince the reader to book directly on your website. To do this, you have to organise the pages so the story makes sense. So the idea is to create a kind of a digital funnel whereby the further down it your customers go, the quicker their slide towards your booking engine. And we'll talk about booking engines in a little more depth later on.

These days, far too many hotel websites are simply showcases of a kind and have not been designed to sell. The thing you have to understand, above all, is that your website is a sales tool. You might even say it's your most important. Sales to your website is the most applicable tool you've got to help you convert visitors from all over the world into direct bookings. Your website is the tool that grants you visibility and transmits your sales message to potential customers, with the express goal of selling them rooms.

Once you begin to fully comprehend this, you will begin the process of becoming more advanced than your competitors and generally a force to be reckoned with. So that's it for the first point website to find and quickly to, onto point number two.

Now we're going to school you on some of the most frequently used website jargon there is. The first one I want to explain is domain name. It's very simple. A domain name is the address of a website. For example, in the real world, your address might be 13. Lucky Strike Road, A75000. Paris, France. Well, in the digital world, aka the internet, your address would then be, let's say 13 lucky strike.com. It's very simple to understand. A domain name is the name of a website. It's how you access it.

Now, you might have heard people speak about a URL and wonder what it is. Well, it's simply the address of a web page. So at this point, you might be getting a little bit confused between a domain name and a URL. That's okay. The thing is, a domain name is a URL. It's the address of a website's homepage. But as you know, or maybe you don't know, no matter, a website can have more than just one homepage. For example, wikipedia.org is the domain name for Wikipedia and is also the URL for the homepage of this website. Whereas e dot wikipedia.org forward slash wiki forward slash Wikipedia about is the URL to access the About Us page on the Wikipedia website.

Now let me ask you a question. Here is end of the world manner. It's addresses third house down the gravel road after the giant oak tree, about five kilometres south of the small village. That's the place Ville. And now here you have the beautiful manor. It's address three, Main Street 75000 Paris. Now, in your opinion, which address is the easiest to remember? It's the second one. It's the beautiful manor, right? I'm sure you can guess why.

Okay, so it ought to be the same for your website. An important thing to remember is if your URL is too long or complicated, it will be more difficult to be remembered by potential customers and will therefore potentially stifle the number of visitors to your website. Now, the other thing to take into account is the association of your URL with your name.

All right. Here we have the typical customer journey. Mr. French is planning a trip. The first thing he is going to do is go on his phone or computer and go to Booking.com or any other OTA to go window shopping. His goal is to get ideas of where to stay. During this process, he is going to make a short list of the places he likes. Then he is going to go on Google to search for those places to see if he can find their website. He wants to know more before making his choice. Most of the time, the hotel website is not good enough to gain Mr. French's trust. So he goes back to an OTA to book the room.

Now, it's important that you remember this customer journey because as you see, the customer is going to eventually look for you and find you in an OTA rather than looking for you on your own page. Okay. If your establishment is called end of the world manner and your URL is not nice, rooms in the countryside, not at all scary and haunted. Please come visit.com. Your website will be difficult to find in Google.

So why do some hotels have this type of URL? There could be several reasons, quite frankly. The first is unfortunately just ignorance. They just don't know that their URLs should match their company name. But there are also those who know and do it voluntarily, in order to be found by potential customers who search Google directly without knowing the name of the establishment they are looking for. The idea is to attract more traffic.

What they don't know, however, is that having multiple domain names pointing to the same website is of little to no help in getting a better SEO ranking. If you've no idea what I mean when I say SEO, don't worry, we're going to cover it later in the course. My advice is this focus on a domain name in correlation with your company name, and apply yourself to perfect your ranking in Google results with that original website.

In other words, you might have heard of and ought to know is website hosting. So far you understand that a website is accessed by a domain name like Wikipedia.org and that it's composed of pages. On each page there is content either text, images, or videos. As you may have guessed or not, this content that you see on your screen needs to be stucked somewhere. It does not magically appear well, actually, in a manner of speaking. I suppose it does. But the fact remains, physical storage is required to.

Well, that's what we mean when we say a website hosting. It's the physical space where all the content of the website is stored. Depending on which technology you choose to create your website, you might have to deal with a web host. My advice? Don't bother. Choose. Choose something that includes web hosting, if only for your own peace of mind.

Last but not least, you might have heard of a domain registrar. As you as you now know, a domain name is something like. W-w-what? This is a domain name. Dotcom, let's say. So a domain registrar is a company that sells domain names. It's where you can buy one. For example, you can buy a domain name from Google as they are an official registrar. To do so, you just have to go to domains, dot google.com and search for the one you want and sees it available.

Okay, that's vocabulary done. Let's cross that one out and move on.

Now let's look at some important statistics again. I will go quickly over them. I don't want you to fall asleep. This one's interesting though. As of January 2022, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide, 59.5% of the global population. We can round

 that up to 60%, let's say. So keep in mind that about 25% of the world population is under 14 years old, which means that in reality, 80% of people in the age of using the internet are actually using it.

So it's interesting though. So as of January 2022, there were 4.66 billion active internet users, 59.5% of the global population. We can rounded up to 60%, let's say. Keep in mind, though, that 25% of the world's population is under 14 years old, which means that in reality, only around 80% of people in the age of the internet are actually using the internet. And of this total, 92.6% rounded up 93%. Access the internet via mobile devices.

Okay, as promised, that's it with statistic. You see, it was shortened. It was sweet. The main thing I want you to take away from that is most likely if people are consulting your website, they're booking it using a smartphone. All right. Keep that point in mind. It's very important. We'll come back to it in a minute.

Now let's cross off statistics and let's address the why of the whole situation.

So why do you need a website? Well, I hope that by now you already know a version of the answer to that question, but I am going to underline it for you anyway.

So with a website, you will be able to be visible to potential customers all around the world. With a good website, you will be able to get potential clients to visit your website. With a very good website, you will be able to convince them to book directly on that website, and without a website, you will be like a weird hermit monk living in a hut in the middle of a long forgotten mythical forest. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It might just be a tad more difficult to attract clients and get more direct bookings, but you know what I mean. Live your own life. That's what I say.

Let's cross that topic out. I am sure there is no need for me to convince you any further. Of the utmost necessity for you to have a website for your property. Just remember, you need one geared up to sell, not just to be pretty.

And that leads me to the last thing I wanted to share with you. In this video, we're going to utilise the power of analogy to illustrate what I've been going on about for the last while. As promised, we're going to make a direct comparison between your property and a shop.

Okay, let's take the example of a small family hotel with ten rooms in the countryside, and put it next to a clothes store in a city centre in a pedestrianised zone. And let's look at the criterias of success for each of those businesses next to one another. Now it could be any kind of shop, really. I just wanted to pick something everyone could easily picture.

So initially, what do you think is the first criteria of success? Now if you answered location, you are correct. Well don't go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. This aspect of success, however, is the first crucial difference between the two. For the coaster, we are talking about physical location. Where is it located in the city? Are there a lot of people walking in front of the shop? Is it easy to find? But as I'm sure you already know, the hotel, it doesn't really matter because that's not how it's going to get clients. It's going to get clients from the internet.

So the most important factor for the hotel is location, but not in the physical world. But in the digital one on the internet like we've been talking about. So the questions you're asking yourself in the case of a hotel is, is the hotel website easy to find? Is it well ranked? Those are the most important criteria for success in a hotel.

Then comes the second most important criteria right? For the clothing store. It's going to be. It's showcase what we see in the shop window. If the shop window is well located, people will walk in front of it, and if they like what they see, they're going to enter the shop for the hotel. It's also the showcase. It's just that this showcase is digital. A digital showcase is the first screen that someone sees when landing on a website. Usually it's at the top of the homepage. It's not to be confused with the whole homepage. No, the shop window is only the first visible part before scrolling being on a mobile device or a computer, the role of this showcase is to convince the website visitor to explore the website, and so you should be under no illusions about just how important it is to have a good one.

A few crucial things to remember about that. You have five seconds to convince. After that the visitor will be gone, so make sure that the first visible screen loads fast. It's okay if the full homepage takes a little bit more to load, as long as the first image, the one you're using to sell loads in under five seconds, ideally under three seconds. Make sure to adapt what you show on the showcase depending on the season and your sales strategy. If we're in August and you have a picture of your property under a blanket of snow, for example, not only are you going to miss out on some business, but you'll also look a bit daft quite frankly.

Imagine if a clothes shop was selling fur coats and gloves in the middle of summer sales wouldn't be good to say the least. Your reputation would also suffer, and well, it's the same for you. It's the same for hoteliers. Keep your digital storefront up to date. For the love of Pete.

Another important point regarding the showcase you need to make it authentic and relatable. You are not a huge corporation like Booking.com, so show it. A good way to do that is like the Sugar Hotel. You see before you here, show some humans, illustrate who your clients are and show your team at the same time.

The third criteria in the closed door is organisation. So when you enter the store, how is it laid out? Is it easy to navigate the store? Is it easy to find information about the products on sale? Is the light nice? How is the ambience? How? What's the feeling that it provokes when you enter?

So for your hotel that translates into website organisation. Is it easy to navigate to find useful information? Is it nice to look at? Is it adapted for mobile users? Very important. Are there nice pictures and videos? Is it easier to find testimonials for example?

And finally, the last criteria of success is the buying experience. Right when time comes to buy something in the store, how easy is it to do so in a closed shop? It should be straightforward. Go with your article to the cashier, pay in a few seconds with contactless credit card or cash and that's that for hotels, however, the buying process is oftentimes way too complicated, too long, with too many steps, too many details asked for. Like, what do you care about the collecting the postal address of your client?

For example, you need to make the buying experience as easy as possible for your clients. They should be able to book a room on your website in just a few clicks, and if they can't, you will lose them to Booking.com or your next door competitor.

Today we've looked into why you need a website and what a good one can do for you will. Next, look at what you need to get started on yours tool wise.

See you next time.

So to summarise this video beforehand. Firstly, an overview. So you understand the software ecosystem on a global scale. Then I'm going to explain what OTAs are and how they work. And after that, I'll tell you about booking engines, followed by a short presentation of what Google Analytics is. And we'll finish up with a brief explanation of what PMS and the channel manager are.

And guys, get this. All the tools I've just referred to you absolutely need all of them to be able to take advantage of the flow of potential customers that OTAs bring to your website, and to convert as many visitors as possible into direct bookings. So, yeah, so that's the warning done. Let's get started with the overview.

So check out this diagram for a minute. It explains the interactions between the tools we'll be covering. At the bottom left, you can see your PMS. We'll look further into that in a little bit. Basically, it's a calendar for your reservations. On the top right is your website. And next to that is your booking engine. Really, these two tools, although separated, should be thought of as one.

Then why are they separate, you ask? Well, I suppose the best way I can think to put it is that the website is from Mars and your booking engine is from Venus, and they're just different. And while it should be a priority of yours that they work together seamlessly as possible from a client point of view, it's important for you to understand the difference, giving you work on the other side of the curtain to them.

You know, the website is static and informs while the booking engine is active, it sells, transmits information, and receives payments to you. It's the difference between a hood and the engine humming under. But to the client, it should all just be Ferrari as far as they can see.

You can think of the website as the storefront, the booking engine is the cash register. It is through the booking engine that sales are made. It's very important to understand and get to grips with this difference.

I mentioned some of this in the last video, but today the majority of booking engines are so independent of websites that they open in new pages or tabs. Does that sound like a Ferrari to you? Really? But put plainly as possible, we want a homogenous, smooth customer journey and experience, especially during the buying process.

Continuing with the closed shop analogy we used in the last video, today, when a booking engine opens in a new page or a new tab, it's as if you had to leave the store where you bought your lovely new jacket and go into the one next door, which might be a baker's or something. For all you know, to pay for your purchases. Now, think about that. First, it would be annoying and it would just be weird. Why? Why do I have to do it? You might even finish your purchase, I suppose, but I'm betting you'd never again shop there, you know? And we don't want that. 

We want a buying process as dangerously but impressively easy as something like Amazon's one-click buy function. So as you can see, we've placed these two in a rectangle called Google Analytics. Below, on the right, are the OTAs. The reason they are here is that, like your booking engine, they are distribution channels. The only difference is that your booking engine is your direct sales channel, and the OTAs are indirect sales channels.

So if you think back to the store with a cash register as a booking engine, then the OTAs are the cash registers of your distributors. Let's say, okay, if you're a retail giant of some sort, if, for example, you have a clothing store and in addition to selling directly from your store, you sell through other stores that you don't own, then those other stores have cash registers, and those are the OTAs. 

Good that they're selling stuff, but you'd rather sell it yourselves, is what we're saying. And between the PMS and the distribution channels, there is the channel manager. This is the invisible hand that will allow the information to go up and down between the PMS and the distribution channels. 

So that's it for the overview. I hope it gives you a good understanding of the interactions between all those tools. Let's cross it off our list.

Okay. Now that you have a global view of all the players, let's see what the OTAs are. OTAs stands for online travel agencies. As you know, a travel agency is a shop that sells travel packages, plane tickets, hotel reservations, guided tours, and so on. Traditional travel agencies are shops you can actually walk into, while OTAs do the same job, but they don't have physical shops. They do it only on the internet, and they do it on a massive scale. They operate in almost all languages, which means that they can sell to anyone on Earth with an internet connection.

The largest OTAs are Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb. Now, I'm sure you're familiar with them, definitely at least Booking.com. If you decide to do so, you can distribute your rooms on OTAs. But as I'm sure you already know, every time they sell one of your rooms, they charge you a commission. 

OTAs are great to be seen and, as you know, thanks to our look at the customer journey in the last video, about half of people visiting OTAs will also try to visit your website. So in terms of exposure alone, it's a good idea to be on the OTA.

That's about it about the OTAs for now. Let's cross it out and let's speak about booking engines.

Now, as explained in the previous video, your website is your tool to sell, but in itself, a website is a set of pages on which there is text, photos, and/or videos. It doesn't actually do any of the selling. In order to be able to sell, you have to combine it with another tool, your booking engine. 

Okay, once again, your site is your closed shop, and your shop won't get far without its cash register, right? The booking engine is a piece of software that will be integrated into your website while being simultaneously hooked up with your PMS and your channel manager. It is absolutely necessary that whatever booking engine you land on is 100% integrated into your website, which is to say that when a visitor to your website clicks on "book," the page that will open must appear like any other page on your website with the same menu, same footer, same colours, fonts, and the same domain name. 

It's essential in order to increase your conversion rate. Basically, the cash register must be in the store; otherwise, you will lose a lot of potential customers. I'll show you what happens when a booking engine is well integrated and when it's not. 

So here at the hotel, a Dodo, for example. As you can see now, when I click book, it opens the booking engine. This booking engine page has the same menu, domain name, colours, font as the rest of the website. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you want. Whereas over here at Hotel Triangle Door, the silly sausages haven't even got their page. They can't find their page. 

Anyway, as you can see, if we click on their CTA, their call to action, their booking engine, we click on some dates and head to it, and it opens in another tab. Looks completely different. The domain name is different. How embarrassing. Guys, you want to avoid this at all costs.

In essence, guys, your website being a selling machine, your booking engine is the heart of your website. It pumps the blood and warrants a biannual check-up with someone highly recommended because of the following crucial tidbit of info: it's the one that makes you the money. So you better understand, you better know how imperative it is to choose one well. 

The problem is that there are hundreds of them at any price you might imagine, and they're all usually more or less designed to be opened on smartphones for the purpose of direct bookings. That's it. Nothing more to say for the moment about the booking engine. We can cross it off the list.

Now let's talk about Google Analytics. As you know, Google is the number one search engine in the world with a 92.37% market share, far, far ahead of its nearest competitor, Bing, which lingers along like an info-hungry basket case with a comparatively insignificant 2.63%. Google is so big they own the verb. 

Google Analytics is one of many stellar tools that the software giant offers for free. Nice of them. It allows you to measure the performance of your website in terms of audience. In short, you will be able to know how many people visit your website, where they come from, if these visitors have arrived at your website through another website, via a link to your website, on your local tourist agency, or a positive TripAdvisor review or whatever. 

So by knowing the number of visitors to your website over a given period of time, you can, in turn, learn your transformation ratio. Simply divide the number of visitors by the number of customers that booked through your website. Google Analytics allows you to know how many people came into your store, how they behaved, and how long they stayed.

So there you go. We can cross Google Analytics off our list and let's move on to the PMS.

PMS is the acronym for Property Management System. This is where you will find what should look like a calendar of all your rooms and reservations. It is the HQ of your sales process. From the PMS, you can manually create reservations and put them in the calendar. You can close rooms so that they are no longer available for sale. You can take notes on your customers to better serve them during their

 stay with you, their preferences, for example. You can establish your prices, your promotions, and also your discount codes. You can manage invoicing. Basically, this is where you manage all the administrative and operational parts of your business.

You need to understand that this is your command post. Okay? This is your enterprise's bridge. From your PMS, you are effectively in charge of everything beyond a mere title but on practical terms, too. The information you will give will be transmitted to your booking engine and to the OTAs. 

Having a good PMS is critical to your success. You want a PMS that is fully integrated with your booking engine, channel manager, and website, everything in the right place. And to all intents and purposes, you're Picard, you're Jean-Luc Picard on the bridge of the enterprise, buddy. Get something even a little bit fragmented, and before you know it, you're Jack Sparrow. You know, you might be fun to be around, but come on, who's in charge here? Your ship is sinking, so that'll do, captain.

Let's cross that off our list and pick the next horizon to head for.

So, one last thing before we boldly go where no hotelier has gone before, but should, if they want to optimise their revenues and crush their competitors. We're talking about channel managers, and I do not mean whoever holds the remote in your home. 

So as we've covered earlier, it is the hidden hand that will transmit information between your PMS and your sales channels, between the OTAs and your booking engine. Let's look at an example. Your hotel has a PMS, a website with booking engine, and you have accounts on Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb. But you don't have a channel manager. A customer called you on the phone to make a reservation for Tuesday, September 10th. You look in your PMS to see if the room that the customer wants is available. It is. So you manually create the booking in your PMS.

Since the PMS is connected to your booking engine, it transmits the information to the latter, but without a channel manager, OTAs don't know that there was a reservation, so they continue to show the room as available. So if you don't do the manual work of going to each of these platforms to manually block the rooms that have just been booked, other guests can come along and book that same room on that same day on the OTAs. And if by bad luck, and it happens more than you think, a customer books on an OTA before you have had time to close that availability on each one, then you're going to have a double booking and a very unhappy customer. 

All right. It's going to be a bunch of them showing up on Thanksgiving, and you've just got turkey for one and negligible potatoes. And you got a whole family to feed. All right. That's the situation you'll end up in without a channel manager.

See? Because with a channel manager, you don't have to worry about double bookings and overbooking. That's the point. You no longer need to manually close rooms in the OTAs. The channel manager will do it for you.

In our example that we just did, when you create your morning, you will reserve a room for Tuesday, September 10th. The channel manager will close this room in the OTAs, and the couple with the donkey can sleep in the stable for all you care. The room is booked.

In addition to this work of transmitting availability information, the channel manager will also transmit price information. In other words, you will create your prices in your PMS. And you will not have to create them in each OTA. The channel manager will transmit your prices to them.

Furthermore, with a good channel manager, you can decide to apply calculation rules to send more expensive prices to OTAs. For example, you can tell your channel manager, "I want all my rooms to be 10% more expensive on Booking.com because that's the commission they charge." And the channel manager will do it automatically without you having to do anything else. 

A good channel manager will also transmit the number of nights you wish to be the minimum stay. Right. So let's say you want people to book two nights minimum. Well, you can set it up in your PMS, and the channel manager will carry this information to the sales channels, the OTAs, and your booking engine.

Now you know what a channel manager is.

Just like a hotel is more than bricks and mortar, your website is more than just code. It's a carefully constructed digital platform designed to welcome guests before you welcome them.

See you next time.

Quick summary. Before we get started, we're going to do a quick overview of what a website is composed of, which I'm aware we've already addressed, but I just want to take a few minutes and land us all on the same page. After that, I will introduce you to what I call the generalist tools or technologies with which you can create websites for many different applications. Then I'm going to tell you about e-commerce tools that are out there, followed by the tools that are specialized for creating hotel websites. Then I'm going to sum it all up and pop a bow on it for you to take home.

Okay, so let's begin, as promised, with a nice, succinct overview of the composition of a website. As I'm sure you remember, a website is in essence a domain name, which, to break down further again, is simply the URL for the homepage, like here gocomics.com. Then you've got pages, for example, gocomics.com/garfield202239whatever. And the content contained on these pages, like text, pictures, videos—all of which need to be hosted by a host. There can be more elements, of course, but that's the basics of what a website is. 

If this seems new to you, it means you probably skipped the first video, didn’t you? You dirty dog. Bad idea. You shouldn’t skip any steps. If you did, pause this video and go back. Otherwise, you will miss out on a lot, and it will be much more difficult for you to achieve your goals.

Now that's all great and well and good, but you might or should be wondering how. How does one make a website? Does one bash letters and numbers in a specific order until you've got a screen full of Matrix-like numbers and then just press enter? Does one cast a spell and some pieces of paper? After several years in Hogwarts, perhaps you could kidnap an information specialist and feed them steak and pina coladas until they finally agreed to use their NASA skillset to create your website. Well, I recommend trying each of these approaches if the modules on this course don’t do it for you, but promise me at least you’ll try my way first. 

At the starter line, you've got two options and one definitive choice. Option one: if you have the financial resources, you can outsource, hire a freelancer from an agency to do it for you. But even if you decide to go this way, still be sure to finish this course. So before you fork out, you know what you should be looking for from whoever you end up hiring.

Option two is to do it yourself. The easiest way to go is to use a website builder, which, before you get excited, is a piece of software and not a muscular, macho man sweating on a sunny day, flexing his arms in a wife-beater. I'm sorry, it just ain't that. A website builder is what you might call a platform. Somewhat meta. It’s a website that you can use to create websites.

All right, let’s cross the overview off the list and press on with what we’re at. Now, let’s have a look at what I referred to earlier as the generalist tools. With them, you can build a little bit of everything, which is great, but it’s also a problem. We'll see why. In short, they’re not as tailored as they might be for the sorts of purposes we’ll find ourselves strapped to as independent hoteliers.

This first one is WordPress. It’s probably the most well-known website builder in the whole wide world, so if you’ve never heard of it, consider yourself upgraded to the group of viewers who really need to listen to me today. Today, about 30% of all the websites in the world use WordPress. Can you imagine having 30% of anything in the world, or 1% even? They’re big boys, that’s for sure. And you can access it all here by going to www.WordPress.com or WordPress.com for short. So good, they don’t need the triple W.

So let’s look at the pros and the cons of using WordPress. The pros first, in green, classic. Like Gordon Gekko himself said, green is good. So, WordPress is free. Well, at least the core tool is free to use. However, as you build a website with WordPress, you will see that you will need additional tools and services, which they're more than happy to provide you for some additional fees. So, hosting costs, security costs—plenty of things cost. Some of them you can do yourself, but they require technical know-how. And let’s be honest, if you’re on WordPress, it’s possible you’re wanting a little in that department.

You can use as many plugins as you like, which is nice. I’ll be honest. A plugin is an additional tool that you can connect to the website builder. For example, if you want to show a map on your website, you might want to show a Google map. In that case, you're going to want to go to the plugin library and choose the Google Map plugin so you can use it on your website. Depending on which you choose, plugins can be free or with a nice price tag attached.

Responsive. It’s already geared up to be responsive. Since you’re new in town, let me explain. Responsive means that the content of the website—what we can see when we look at the website, let’s say—will adapt depending on the screen you’re looking at it from. So if you are looking at a website on a desktop computer or on a mobile, the content will automatically rearrange itself to suit your screen. Which is a great feature. If I were WordPress, this is the one I’d have been bragging about at the bar after work, back when it wasn’t available on every single website builder out there. It used to be their big deal, but now everyone’s got it, which is what WordPress probably moans at its bartender a few times a week. So it is a pro, but, you know, like a microwave—everyone’s got one, so who cares?

It's open source, which is again, pretty cool. That means you can access the source code, which is wonderful if you're a developer. It means you can create almost anything with it. But if you are like me and most independent hoteliers, you don’t really care about this one. To put it frankly, a mechanic might be impressed by how it is that you can start a car with a button and no key these days, but I'm still just impressed that there are cars at all, and that's as far as I intend to get with knowing how they work. Same with websites.

Now, let's look at the cons in red. Red is bad, of course. So the first one—and it’s a big one—is that you will need to install regular updates for your website to stay up to date in terms of security, design, accessibility, and so on. WordPress is not going to do it for you, so either you have enough technical knowledge to do it yourself, or you will have to pay someone to do it for you. If you don’t, your website is slowly going to decay and you will find yourself at risk of being victim to hackers.

Which brings us to the second big con of WordPress. Yes, it’s open source, which can be great, but the other side of that coin is that hackers can access the source code and therefore make it much, much easier if they want to hack you. If you do all the updates, you should be okay. But still, it’s annoying to know that you will be an easy and favourable target for hackers who essentially know more about how your website works than you do.

Next is customizing a WordPress website is not as intuitive as other technologies. You need some web design knowledge to do it, or you need to pay for additional tools that will help you bridge the gap. These are the plugins I told you about. Depending on your requirement, you might need multiple plugins, which adds complexity to your process.

The next generalist tool that you can choose from is Joomla. It’s WordPress’s direct competitor. You can access it with this link at joomla.org. It’s a lot like WordPress. It’s open source, you can connect a lot of plugins, it's already ready for responsive design, and the core of the system is free. The biggest difference is that Joomla has been created for larger and more complex websites. I’ve used it in the past and I find it much more complicated to use than WordPress. 

You have the same drawbacks as using WordPress, and additionally, it’s much more complicated to use. That said, you can do more things with it than you can with WordPress. It's just a little bit of overkill in terms of our needs as independent hoteliers. It's perfect for developers that are being tasked with creating large and complex websites. Let's say you need to build a train ticket reservation website or something. Then Joomla is just the ticket for you. But for independent hoteliers, it just doesn't make sense to use it in my opinion. Apart from, of course, if you already have been trained on Joomla and you know how to use it, in that case, it could make sense for you.

The last generalist tool that I want to present is Wix. You might have heard about it or seen ads on social media. You can access Wix by going to Wix.com. The great thing about Wix is that it’s really intuitive to use. Unlike WordPress or Joomla, literally anyone that knows how to use a computer can start building a website with Wix.

Here are the pros

: easy. Am I repeating myself? It ain’t the years, it’s the mileage, honey. But yes, essentially the biggest advantage of Wix is that it’s very easy to use. So if you plan on taking on the website yourself, that’s huge. Another cool thing is that they have many templates to choose from. The only problem is they don’t have that many made for hotels, but still, you should be able to find something you like. Same goes with features. This is the name they give to plugins. It’s a better name. Fair play to them. They have a lot of them, which is really cool. The problem is that they don’t really have what we need in terms of functionalities for an independent hotel, and that’s too bad because that’s what we have.

And here come the cons: the free version has the Wix branding on it, which you definitely do not want on your website. If you are serious about generating direct bookings, that means you will have to go for a paid plan. Personally, I don’t see it as a problem because even the tools that are supposed to be free like WordPress and Joomla all have hidden costs. Just like the famous lunch that doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a free website either. And if it’s free, guess what? You’re probably what’s for sale. 

But by far the biggest drawback is the non-availability of having an integrated booking engine. We've covered how crucial one is for generating direct bookings, so let's go ahead and park Wix in the present no-no space because they've earned it with that one.

So let’s call it a day on the generalist tools. Note, there are many more, but I’ve just stuck to the mainstream on this one because they're mainstream for a good reason. It’s likely that they are the best of the bunch. As you can see, a common problem with all these generalist tools is that they do not offer the full ecosystem we need as independent hoteliers, which means that if you choose to create a website with one of them, you're going to need to find a booking engine and integrate it to your website. And then you need to find a channel manager and integrate that and then synchronize everything with a PMS. 

It’s a lot of work, is what I’m saying. Even if some plugins exist in WordPress and Joomla to do booking engines and some PMS functionalities, they are very far from being good enough for our needs, and they do not offer channel managers at all. The same is true for Wix. It offers a booking engine with a small PMS, but it lacks so many of the basic functionalities we need that you will need to integrate a third-party booking engine anyway, as well as a PMS and channel manager. 

The issue is that if you do all that, you are going to have multiple technologies stacked, which in the end will only increase the cost. Also, if one goes wrong, they will point fingers at each other saying it’s not their fault, which makes sense because they’ll all be playing for different teams. I'm getting so specific on this point because I have had this issue in the past when I was a general manager myself, and it’s really annoying. Having to look for solutions from multiple sources makes it very difficult to have proper support when something actually does go wrong, and trust me, something will always go wrong when it comes down to it. 

And the last thing you need is too many cooks spoiling the broth at that point.

Okay, that’s it for the generalist tools. Let’s cross it off. Now, let’s look at e-commerce tools. E-commerce is selling something on the internet, which is exactly what we do as hoteliers. We sell rooms on the internet. So it’s important to really scour the shelves for something that works for you on this point. There are other e-commerce solutions like Square Online or Squarespace, which is also quite famous, but I'm not going to waste your time with these technologies simply because they are not adapted to your needs. Selling rooms online is a very specific thing to do, and these solutions are just not well focused on our market or our industry. They simply do not offer the functionalities we need and I wish them all the best in their endeavors. But they won’t be getting my business anytime soon. And I’m sure they’ll be fine. 

I just want you to be aware that these tools exist, and that if one day, in addition to your property, you want to launch an online shop, these are the go-to technologies to use. They're big names for a reason. For most purposes, they do work well. It's just that we are after something with ever so slightly more specific options.

Okay, so let's cross that one off our list. I’m sure you got the point there. And now that I’ve pooh-poohed the biggest names out there, I may need to change my name at some point, with takes as hard as these ones I’m giving you. 

Let’s see what hospitality-focused technologies are out there. I’m only going to speak about all-in-one technologies because I believe that’s what we need as independent hoteliers. Enough of this stacking nonsense. What do I mean by all-in-one exactly, you’re asking? Well, I mean one company or technology that offers the website builder, booking engine, PMS, and channel manager all in one nice and easy package. This way we don’t have to worry about connecting different tools to each other. We don’t have to worry about paying different players. We have only one point of contact to get in touch with when there is a problem, which should buy us a bit of peace of mind.

The first one I’d like to introduce is called Ovivo. You can visit the website by going to ovivohotel.com. There is no free trial for this tool, so if you choose it, you will have to start paying right away. I strongly advise you to book a demo with them before making your choice. Oh, by the way, let's actually take a quick break on this one and let me open a small parentheses. 

Before speaking with any supplier, make sure to create a list of requirements, all right? List all the things you absolutely need or want, and list all of the things that would just be nice to have as well. Do this before speaking with them. A demo should be a way for you to check if they can answer your needs. This is a good way to avoid being sold something that you don't need, you know, and to make sure you get what you want. Not to worry. I will help you by showing you later in this course how to build a list of requirements for your website.

Okay, parentheses closed. I won’t go in-depth during this presentation about Ovivo, as we’re going to get back to them later for something a little more hands-on.

The second one you can have a look at is called Hialo, but spelled differently. You can visit their website by going to hialo.com. It’s a direct competitor of Ovivo. Same thing as for Ovivo: book a demo with them once you have your requirements on paper and in order. One advantage of Hialo is you can try it for free for 21 days, which should be plenty of time, to be honest, to decide whether they're the right fit for you or not.

Anyway, I’ll be showing you also how to build a website with Hialo in a separate training down the way. 

The third and final tool I want to show you is Amenitiz. As with the other ones, it’s an all-in-one solution for hoteliers. You can explore their website by going to amenitiz.com. At the time of filming this video, they have a 14-day free trial, so you can play around with the tools and even put that into the building of your requirements list all before you book a demo. Okay. That’ll genuinely help you understand what you really need and what they can provide for you.

So just like with Ovivo and Hialo, I'm going to show you how to build a website with Amenitiz later on in a different training course. Right. So keep up to date, keep watching all the videos, and by the end, you will have a good idea of which one is best for you.

Just like a hotel is more than bricks and mortar, your website is more than just code. It’s a carefully constructed digital platform designed to welcome guests before you welcome them.

See you next time.

Let's get started with that introduction then. As you know, your website is your main direct selling tool. You may also know you should. I'm telling you that it must be built in such a way as to optimise sales, to convert the maximum number of people visiting your website into buyers. Previously, I told you about a concept, the sales funnel. The principle is actually simple with a thorough knowledge of customer behaviour during the booking process on a website. Studies have distilled a number of key steps that visitors must go through before potentially becoming customers. The idea with the sales funnel is therefore to plan the customer journey sequentially so that the customer can go through these steps one by one.

Mr. Frenchy, here the website visitor starts at the top of the funnel, and as he validates his interest, he slides on to the next step. The goal is to make him slide to the very end of the funnel towards the last step, which is the all-important booking phase. In order to set up an effective sales funnel, you need to know the rule of three. It is the most important rule for building your funnel, and the architecture of your website must obey this rule at every turn. So here it is. There are three sequential steps a visitor goes through before booking on a hotel website in chronological order. They are one, looking at visuals, two, reading reviews and watching testimonial videos, and three, they finally get to checking the prices.

Now there is a catch. That's only the first part of the rule of three. There is the second part. The second part is that the order of importance of those three steps is opposite to the chronological order people go through. That means that the most important criteria in the booking process is the price, then the reviews and testimonials, and finally the visuals. So same steps, different order of importance.

What does that mean? Well, it's very simple actually. Your website visitors will try to validate these three elements before making the decision to book on your website or not. The order in which they will consult the elements is exactly the opposite order of importance they give them. The first thing your visitors will look at are the visuals—photos, videos, the general aspect of the site, its graphics, etc. This is the first step they are going to have to validate. If they don't validate this step, they will leave your website. Simple as that. But even if they validate this step, it does not guarantee that they will book on your website because, say it with me now, in their order of importance, the visuals come last after the price and the testimony. It's all very Freudian, isn't it?

So if they validate their interest through the visuals on your website, that will see them slide a little further down the funnel to the next step, where unconsciously, they'll immediately commence to look for a cool validation of their choice to stay. They will seek this reassurance from what is called social proof, which means testimonials and reviews from other clients. This step is crucial, guys. If they can’t find testimonials on your website, they will leave it to find them on a third-party source such as TripAdvisor or Booking.com. And in that case, it's game over and they won’t come back to your website.

If you have testimonials and reviews on your website that cannot be authenticated, you will have the same result, or worse, it will be concluded that you're a swindler of some sort and you will lose the trust of your site visitors, which is a heck of a thing to happen to someone who wishes to capitalise on site visitors. The thing is, that should be surprising to no one, is your average visitor these days is relatively internet savvy and fully aware. Testimonials can be faked, so to be able to verify them is no paltry matter, but actually an effective and easy way—because what's easier than honesty?—of bolstering your stock in the eyes of potential buyers.

The thing that should be surprising to absolutely no one is your average visitor these days is relatively internet savvy and fully aware. Testimonials can be faked, so to be able to verify them is no paltry matter, but actually an effective and easy way. Because what's easier than honesty of bolstering your stock in the eyes of potential buyers? And don't worry, I will show you later in this video how to implement reviews and testimonials visitors can trust. If your visitors validate this second step with testimonials on your website that they have deemed authentic and trustworthy, they will then move on to the next step: checking your prices.

This third step—remember, last in chronological order, but first in importance. You know they might have liked your visuals. They might have been convinced by the testimonials. But if you've not done your revenue management homework, this will put a hole in the ship and you'll be joining Jack in no time from *Titanic*, you know? And anyway, remember that the conversion ratio of your website is the number of bookings during a given period divided by the total number of visitors during that period, multiplied by 100. The rule of three is to optimise this conversion ratio so that it is as high as possible.

So much for the introduction. We can cross that off our list. Let's now look at some statistics that will influence how you go about constructing your website.

So let's talk about smartphones first. You know those little bricks that we walk around everywhere with and without which our existence would be basically meaningless? Either that, or we'd be more social and understanding of people with different opinions from our own. Anyway, like them, love them, or hate them, it is possible to tick all three of these boxes. They're here to stay. And getting to grips with them from the point of view of building a website is paramount if you want to turn visitors into customers.

Today, smartphones are omnipresent in our society, and this omnipresence has a very heavy impact on the behaviour of your customers. Check this out. Right. In Europe alone, around 80% of bookings made the week before the arrival date are made on smartphones, right? Let that settle. I don't have a statistic handy for every continent, but I'd be fairly sure it's something similar wherever you go. Reservations taken together, smartphones represent more than 50% market share, and that share is growing constantly. It's a good bet that we're talking about exponential growth here, until ordering anything in any other way will gain you suspicious looks from your fellow humans.

So if that's not enough to convince you of the importance of the mobile version of your site, know this: since 2017, Google has implemented a policy they call *Mobile first*. Before this policy, Google considered the version of your desktop website as the most important one to reference you in a search engine query. But since *Mobile first*, mobile is first. Google considers the mobile version of your site as the one to reference, so you need to make sure you have a website that is superbly adapted to every kind of smartphone. Otherwise, you risk both losing potential customers and going down the Google rankings.

Another important stat to take into account is your website's loading speed. Now, in today's world of ever-minimising attention spans, people don't like to wait and are happy to zip on to the next thing. If your site is taking even slightly longer than it takes to say, "I want it now," we move very quickly from one piece of information to another, and we do not like to wait. And whether our dwindling capacities for paying attention are the chicken or the egg, the fact of the matter is, your typical website is expected to, and usually does, load before anyone's brain has time to start thinking about what they want for lunch, or what flash offers are on Amazon, etc. It's a jungle out there. Grab a vine and start swinging.

How many seconds do you think you have to load before your average visitor hits the old dusty "next" fill? Five seconds is the answer. Now, that might seem like very little to you. Unfair, even. And you're right. But it is what it is. Hence the importance of having a website that loads fast. And notice, though, it's actually okay if your full homepage takes a little longer to load. The important point is that what appears on the screen of the user—either on a desktop, tablet, or phone—the basic display that says "Hello, how may I help you?" must load in five seconds or less. There are many silly ways to lose clients, but one is preventable. This is not one you should be accepting under any circumstances.

The next step might surprise you. What do you think the most consumed type of media on the internet is? Videos. Okay, maybe you knew that. Maybe you guessed it. But do you know in what proportion? Videos represent 80% of the data flow on the internet, which is massive when you think about it. Even more surprising, where do you think people watch more videos: Facebook or YouTube? Well, it's Facebook, with 8 billion videos seen every day, compared to 4 billion on YouTube. And to echo what we were saying earlier about the use of smartphones, more than 50% of videos watched on the internet are watched with a smartphone. There are many other stats about the importance of videos as a media on the internet, but I think you get the point.

If you want to know more, and it is interesting

 and worth knowing if you want to fully engage on a technical level, you can visit the site techjury.net. I had a blog article on video consumption statistics. It's all there for you.

Another very important point: languages. Now, you don't necessarily need to translate your website into Japanese, but at least into French, Spanish, Italian, and German, which is not to have a go at the Dutch or the Portuguese or the Scandinavians. The fact is, visitors from those countries are much more likely to speak good English, while of the more populous and prosperous nations I led with, people are a lot more likely to simply chill and be happy with their mother tongue and damn the eyes of the English speakers. And, as is more important to you, the websites featuring content in English only.

To be honest, though, even all those might be too much of a reach, or rather a reach in the wrong direction. If you've done a good job creating your sales strategies, you know the nationalities you're more likely to be visited by. If anybody numbers high among them in any significance—Danes, let's say—then make up what technology has diminished to a relatively minuscule effort, and get a version of your site out in Danish. It's the least you could do.

This is, of course, valid for all languages. I have a former client in Paris who had a lot of Chinese clients via the years, and the simple fact of translating her website into Chinese had a considerable impact on the number of them who started booking directly on her website.

One last stat. This one is incredibly important, and surprisingly few people know it. If your booking engine opens in a new page or tab, it represents 50% shopping cart abandonment. This means, right, that one of two people who choose to book directly on your website will drop out of the process if your booking engine opens in a new tab or window. Let that sit in your head. All right, that's huge. There should be a depression like a crater left in your head after that.

So guys, no excuses. And I'm going to say it again: it is absolutely necessary to have a booking engine that stays on your site. When that's completely integrated, you heard me. I've said it like five times now. If you're watching these videos in order, please take me seriously. You're probably like 20 minutes into this already. Good for you. So if you're looking to turn visitors into clients, if you want your soufflé to lift and sit, this is your Parisian pastry chef: integrate your booking engines or don't bother with the internet. Print some leaflets and try the analogue methods. It might be more of a success story for you than making your visitors change websites every time they attempt to give you money.

That's it for the stats. Let's put a line in it and move on. 

Next up, we want to raise our customers' awareness. Now, if your first question is "What the heck does that mean?" you're in good company, and I've got you covered. Today, OTAs have a major asset in their marketing power thanks to their financial resources, but they also have an Achilles' heel. Customers are not sure how OTAs work, especially when it comes to commissions. Indeed, actually, the vast majority of customers don't even think about it. They use OTAs because they're fast, easy, and they think they might get the best prices, but they don't give a damn how it works. But they might, if you took the time to explain a little.

That's right. You heard me. So when you explain to your customers that OTAs take big commissions, and that if those same customers were to book directly with you, they would pay less, you strike a very sensitive chord. Remember, in the rule of three, price is the most important factor when it comes to booking a room.

There is another card to play in the explanation game, though. You tell them the story. The true story of the big scary corporation trying to keep the small, independent business underfoot. So not only do you have a financial incentive on your side, if you tell the story straight, you can also win their sympathies. Now you have everything to gain by playing on transparency and authenticity. 

Obviously, don't do it in a distasteful manner. Don't whinge and moan. It's a question of informing your customers and making them sensitive to the fact that their interests and those of your hoteliers—David to the OTAs' Goliath—would be better served if they book directly. This information should be visible and noticeable right away as soon as you arrive on your website.

Now, there's one aside that I need to make clear, right? In some countries, OTAs have the right to ask for price parity. That means that OTAs can have access to your best price. Now, this does not necessarily mean that they have access to your best deal. For example, you can create an offer on your website that says that if people book directly with you, they will have the lower price—the same price they can have with an OTA—but with you they will get a complimentary breakfast or whatever you like. It can be a complimentary anything—access to your spa, a dessert at the restaurant, a bottle of wine, free shuttle service. In some countries, like in France, for example, you don't have the legal obligation to give your best price to the OTAs, which means you can just sell at a better price on your website. You will have to check in your own country which rules apply.

Okay, that's the aside over. The other thing you can do is include a page on your website where you talk directly to your potential customers. You should keep what you tell them fairly succinct, the idea being to have it in a video and/or text format. The goal is not to be emotional, but factual and authentic. Though a little bit of emotion can work in your favour if you don't overdo it.

On the Hotel Dodo page, we call this "Earn More." As titles go, you might say it's slightly vague, but it's certainly not misleading. The idea is a potential customer will discover through reading this page that if he books directly with us, he has more to gain than if he goes through an OTA. Generally speaking, and we've said it before, you need to tell a story, your story. The goal of the story is to authenticate your establishment in the eyes of your customers. You are not just a company that sells a product, like Booking.com, for example. No, you are who you are with your particularities, and that's the thing to capitalise on, because that way, in a sense, there's no one in your corner of the market but you.

If you tell your story well, you're going to create a relationship between you and the visitor to your website, and you don't need to write an essay or anything in order to tell that story. Sometimes visuals and a few words are enough. Customer testimonials are also a great way to tell your story, but we'll talk about that a little bit later.

Another thing that's super important is that your website needs to evolve. Your own story is going to evolve naturally over time, as will your website. And what you show on your website must always be up to date with the reality of what's going on in your hotel. Imagine your local beach bar on a blisteringly hot day, decides to turn off the ice machine and start selling hot mulled wine. You know what I'll have at the end of the day? Yeah, lots of mulled wine and no customers.

Better example: I have clients who own a guest house near Bordeaux. Their customers were very happy to see a very nice donkey walking around the house. I asked them why it wasn't on their website. They told me that the donkey had arrived two years ago, but that the website had been made 40 years ago. I said, come on guys, the website must be more alive than that. This kind of info could really make waves when it comes to reinforcing the authenticity and rustic nature of the property.

So if you have renovated rooms, update the photos. If you've installed a swimming pool and it is not on your website, you've dropped the ball. Man. Good news is it's easily picked up and played again.

I know that there are some people among you who still think that changing the content of a website is difficult, but no, guys, come on, persevere. Get your head in the game. It ain't as difficult as all that. That's why I'm here, all right? To show you that.

So to summarise on awareness: your visitors need to know the second they arrive on your page that they'll get the best deal by staying and booking directly. A good thing to do is create an awareness page to give more details to your visitors as to why they should book directly. You need to differentiate yourself from the OTAs by using your authenticity. As I've said, if need be, don't hesitate to play the card of the small business fighting against the capitalist giants without falling into melodrama, of course. You have to tell a story with your visuals, text, videos, customer testimonials. And lastly, you need to make your website evolve.

So much for customer awareness. You can cross that off the list. Of course, what is valid on your website is also valid when you welcome your customers, talk to them. If they came, they need to educate them. You can make posters even in your establishment, that will raise your customers' awareness of why they need to book direct. Take a look at this picture for example. It speaks directly to the customers, tells them to book direct.

The next point is the visuals. There's a lot of things that come into play here. Let's firstly talk about the most important element of your website, the CTAs. This acronym means *call to action*. In reality, it will be better translated by saying *incentive to buy in*. In our case

, *incentive to book*. Here are the rules that you must respect at all times for your CTAs.

You need a CTA in the top right-hand corner of your website, in its desktop and tablet version. It must always be there, fixed. And that means that if you scroll down on the page, the CTA is still visible, and that the colour contrasts with the rest of the website. Why? Well, because it's eye-catching, you know, eye-tracking studies—studies of visual behaviour of visitors to websites—have found that this is where visitors look for that button, you know, and if the colour contrasts, you know, they'll see it more easily. It's the basic.

The fact that it's fixed, so always visible, is super important as well, guys. So it's necessary that at any time your visitors can make a reservation. When they go through your sales funnel, they are liable to move to the last step at any moment. So the logic follows that the CTA must be visible and available to them every second. There, there.

The other important point about CTAs is that it doesn't take just one. You need to regularly show your customers calls to action on your website to invite them to book. Also, know that you are not obliged to put CTAs that all say *book*. No. You do need a main one that is explicit enough, but the others can still be. They can be different. As you can see on the homepage of the Hotel Dodo here, see here guys, we've got our first CTA. Got another right there. Keep going down. "Discover a room," says something different. It's a CTA. Click here to book a room and enjoy our pool. Over here to enjoy our movie theatre. That's nice. Four living rooms and has many fireplaces. Click here to enjoy them. Book a room with us and get an everlasting massage. That's quite an offer.

They've got a bowling alley. I do. Wait a second. I mean, this is a gym for those who like to exercise. It's possible at the Hotel Dodo, guys. I mean, we've got our photography game up. You might have noticed there's lots of pictures, and they're all very flattering. However, something pretty essential is missing. Do you notice it? There's nobody in the pictures. Yes. The Hotel Dodo is not a real hotel, so we did not take pictures with customers and staff because they're not real either.

But that's exactly what you should do when you make your pictures for your hotel, okay? Include people. People like people. Your photos need to be alive so your potential customers can imagine themselves as guests in your hotel. It's very important to choose who will appear in the photos. If, thanks to your work on segmentation, you have identified that your dream clientele is mostly composed of people in their 50s, and that you have your, I don't know, 18-year-old intern pose for the photos, your clients will have difficulty projecting themselves into the establishment.

Let me show you a hotel that did it right. So let's head over to the hotel's website. As you can see, when visiting this website, there are a lot of people in the pictures. They're alive. That's what you have to aim for with your pictures. Alive people. Obviously, good pictures with no people in them is always better than no pictures at all. You can start well enough with just some of your hotel, bricks and mortar floors, and ceiling, and gradually replace them with photos containing figures that represent your target clientele.

Well, for the photos, if you can, I advise you to hire a professional photographer. Not everyone can take good photos, and investing in good visuals will be a drop in the ocean compared to the return on investment you'll get if you get this website right. And key to that is getting those visuals spick and span. There are a lot of websites you can go to in order to hire freelancers. Check what is available in your country. I know these three you can see on the screen right now. I've used them, and maybe they're available in your country, maybe not. If they're not, I'm sure you can find an equivalent. Quite frankly, these websites will allow you to find someone who fits your budget and your sensibilities.

Okay, piece of advice: as with your website builder, to find well in advance what you want before bringing in a photographer. If you don't give them exact specifications of what you want, they might do something a million miles away from what you had in mind, and there'll be no one to blame but yourself. So think in advance about what you want to photograph, who you want in the pictures, at what time of day, with what accessories. The more you think about this in advance, the better the results will be. I promise you.

What is valid for photos is also valid for videos. If you can include short videos on your site, so short they're almost pictures, this works well not only to cater to short modern attention spans, but also to not put too much weight on the page and doesn't negatively affect your loading times, so you should favour shorter formats. Three minutes should be about the maximum you're willing to put up there. Another thing: never have the sound automatically turned on when the page loads. That is to say that when a page opens, the video must not start with the sound on. It must be silent. If the visitor wants to activate the sound, they can. Studies have shown, and I can hardly agree, that people just don't like it when the sound is on automatically. They like the choice. Presumably because people often use the internet and peruse hotel websites in places where a big blast of hotel promotion from foreign speakers sees a whole crowd of strangers turn and stare at them. Okay, leave it up to them if they listen. If the visuals are good enough, you know, how could they not want to listen?

Basically, the vast majority of people will give their focus mostly to your homepage. You should therefore take advantage of this page in order to give them a full picture of what is available in and around your hotel without overloading the page too much. The ideal situation is to first have a banner with an overview of your message—"Book directly with us for the best rate" or something like that. You can see an example of it here with the Hotels Anat in Paris. So if we go to this page, and then under the first banner, the visitor scrolls down, the hotel's story is told with a variety of images and visuals and text. You see, try not to cram too much information in each banner. By the way, the banner is the part of the page that stays static while the rest is moving as you're scrolling. If you have a nice video presentation, you can put it on the homepage too. Just as we said, nothing too big so it doesn't slow down the page's loading. Page loading fast is important.

Another important point for your homepage is the footer. This will be common to all the pages of your website, but it is on the homepage that your visitors will see it first. It is absolutely necessary that you have the link to your terms and conditions, your legal notices, and your contact page in the footer. Good practice is also to have your phone number and direct email in the footer so people don't have to look for them for too long. Basically, they know where they are, and they can find them if they want them. It's necessary to make yourself easily reachable. You see, in the same logic as your contact page, having a form is good, but also put your email and your phone number. Most people don't like to use contact forms.

Speaking of making you contactable, if you have a budget, adding an assistant part can be a very good way to improve your conversion ratio. Companies like Quick Text or Review Pro do a good job of this, so look them up.

Speaking of colours, remember, everyone has their own tastes. One thing is apparent, though, based on more of those famous studies: brown and its associates are the least attractive colours and you should avoid using them. In fact, it is thanks to these studies that the colour dark brown has been chosen in France for cigarette packages. So there, the goal for the government was to choose the colour that would be the least attractive in order to lower sales of cigarettes. But, and I don't know if you've been to France recently, I don't know how well it worked.

All right, let's cross out the visuals from our list and move on to testimonials and reviews. This is the element on which TripAdvisor capitalised to become a $1.6 billion company. In fact, all TripAdvisor's business is based on customer opinions and testimonials. So believe me, and believe them, reviews and testimonials are worth their weight in gold.

Today, customer reviews and testimonials, which are in fact the same thing, are central to the purchasing process. You know this already because you know the rule of three. A Harvard Business Review study showed that the more customer-generated content there is on a website, the more bookings there were on that same website. You can see it on websites like Amazon, for example. The products with the most reviews simply sell more. It's the same thing on Booking.com. The more comments you get from your customers, the better your ranking is, and therefore the more sales you close. Since we know that potential customers are looking for these testimonials to help them make their decisions, it's best practice to give them some. But as we've already spoken about, we need to be careful about the way we do it. If you think that including a few sentences with a picture on your website will do the trick, you are wrong. Internet users know well that it may have been written by the owner of the website, so they don't trust this kind of review.

You have two solutions to this little pickle, right? Firstly, you could include screenshots of reviews you received on OTAs. Everybody knows

 you need to have been to the hotel in order to leave a review on Booking.com or Expedia. Therefore, people tend to trust those kinds of reviews. Depending on what CMS you use for your website, you can use plugins instead of screenshots. Also, a lot of people just use Leave Out a Book for this kind of thing. If you have a physical book in your hotel where people can write reviews, you can scan or take pictures of the pages and put them on your website. It is old school, but it's definitely better than nothing.

But the real good solution is video, of course. As you know well by now, videos are what people look at most on the internet, and they are also something that cannot be easily faked. Ideally, you'd put a testimonial page with videos of your customers. Here, I'll show you what it looks like. So here, video testimonials on the Adoro site. It's how it should look.

So next question, and a good question: How do you harvest these videos? Well, there are several options. First is simply by asking your customers if you can film them. It has to be done in a very informal way. If you feel you're vibing well enough with a guest, you simply ask them if they would have two minutes to do a quick video testimonial. It's real simple to do, and you'll be surprised how many people agree. It's by far the simplest method. A variation of this method is not to film them yourself, but simply to give them your tablet so they can film themselves. They can also film themselves with their own tablet or phone and just send you the video afterwards. You know how technology works.

Don't forget, the simplest method is a direct contact with your customers and just ask them, okay? Ideally, you should arrange for them to do the videos in different areas of your hotel, inside and outside, and this will allow the different videos to show potential customers around the hotel at the same time as they hear people heaping praise on it. Important: These videos should be no longer than two minutes, all right, at the absolute max.

One tip is just kind of, you know, get their ear a second and hint to them. Give them an example of what they might say. I mean, often they might not have any ideas right away, and this will allow them—you can influence what they can say, right? You could say, "Hello, Mrs. Paul, I'm very happy that you told me that your stay is going really well. Can I ask a favour? Would you agree to make a video for our website?" Okay. Something very informal, of course, where you could say, "Do what you really like about us. You like our breakfast, for example." You say that, you can be pretty sure she's going to talk about the breakfast after that. All right. The power of suggestion.

Ideally, ask them to go through these three steps: just introduce themselves, explain what they like, and recommend it to somebody. Let's take a second to talk about something that I know will happen. I know that many of you—far too many of you—are not going to dare to ask your customers to make a video. I've heard it all. It's not my character. It's embarrassing. I might bother them, I wouldn't dare. It's not our policy. The spirit here is that our customers feel at home, so I don't want to disturb them. I could give you many, many more excuses because I've heard them all.

I'll tell you one thing, guys: it is what it is. As in all walks of life, you can't win this without getting out of your comfort zone a little bit, all right? If it was easy, everyone would do it. The other thing is that your competitors and the OTAs are not going to make any excuses. They're going to go out and win customers, and if you don't, you will lose. And you don't want that. I don't need to tell you. Forget all the excuses you make for yourself right now and go do it. Because these testimonials, guys, they are essential. If you want to make more direct bookings, and video testimonials are the most effective, all right, I can't say it enough. It's essential. Go do it now.

We've said that there’s another option. It doesn't work as well, but, you know, it's something. You can leave a small note in their rooms, right? So the goal is to offer them a reward of some kind in exchange for them leaving a video testimonial on your Facebook page or theirs or anywhere else. The advantage is that from your Facebook page, you can easily download it as a video to reuse it on your website. And what you offer them? It should be something they can consume during their stay. For example, a free bottle of wine, access to spa, box of chocolates, whatever you want. And what's important is that they can enjoy it during their stay.

Okay, guys, now let me reiterate: the more effective method is to ask directly, and it costs you nothing except for some people to get out of their comfort zone. And come on, guys, the price is worth paying. Spiritual growth. Your customers really are your best ambassadors, right? These video testimonials are the word of mouth of our era. It's a particularly effective tool, and I'm encouraging you to take full advantage of it. All right. That's my final word.

All right, so that's it for testimonials. I think you've understood their importance. So we're going to cross it off the list. And now, price. As you may have guessed, because I have already said it many times, and it's the key to unlocking direct bookings, pricing. Okay. We won't go into too much detail today because it deserves its own dedicated training session. At the time where you're watching this video, we're either preparing this training, or it might even already be available. Who knows when you're watching this video, right, guys? Point is, it'll be there eventually or it's there now.

But here's what, for today, you must absolutely remember regarding pricing, right? Price is the most important criterion in the booking process. Your best available deals should always be on your website, and your prices should never be lower with intermediaries than they are on your website.

Okay, okay, so now you know more about how to have a website that turns visitors into customers than most web agencies, all right. Good for you. Before I leave you, there is one more thing I would like you to remember: you do not sell rooms. You don't sell nights in beds either, nor are you selling an experience as many will tell you. No, you're not selling any of that. You are selling the story your customers will tell once they leave your hotel. That's one of the secrets of the profession, guys.

If you have done your job poorly, your clients will talk negatively about you. If you have done your job well, they won't talk about you. If you've created a story worth telling, they will talk about you and give you the best publicity in the world. Think about that. What do you want your clients to say when they get home to their family and friends?

You now have a clear picture of how understanding customer behaviour and leveraging visuals and testimonials can positively influence the direct bookings you get on your site. You know the difference a good pricing strategy can have when seeking to make your website a direct booking machine. If you only remember one thing, make it this: each and every guest presents an opportunity to create a lasting impression, to be shared by you or them. Thanks for watching and learning.

Firstly, for those in the cheap seats, we're going to define SEO, at which point we'll name the three basic rules you ought to obey in the SEO sandbox. They are probably the most important thing we'll cover. By the by, I mean the only important thing. No, but the most important, certainly. So time your espresso for that point. Okay.

Then we're going to go into the SC. Oh you see, and that which you don't. Simple enough followed by a little bit on keywords and the Google search engine, plus all the great tools Google offers to help us fine tune our SEO work like Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google My Business. Then we're going to look into the KPIs of SEO. That's right, double acronym means serious business.

And finally, we're going to round off with some warnings that will help you set off in the right direction. I know that seems like a mouthful, but I'm just going to skim the basics of each of these points. Otherwise a this video would be about a day and a half long and be. If you're watching this, you're at the initial stages, and it's likely a bare skim is all you'll need to get going. So that's the intro in the bag.

Let's get to defining this bad boy. Okay, so word for word SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is exactly what it is. But I'll break it down a little bit. It amounts to everything you can do to get potential guests to your website right off the bat of Google searches, such as this one here for Hotel Sugar in Paris. Now of course, when I say Google, I also mean other search engines. But considering Google is about, you know, 90% of a market share, I think that's an acceptable shorthand.

It should be noted as well that while SEO is quite beneficial in its results and methodical in its approach, it's all completely free. Anything in this ballpark that requires financial investment is called SEM or search engine marketing, and it won't be appearing in this video at all. So if you pay Google or whoever, so you'll rank higher. This is ACM and you can see that the hotel should, has a bit of that going on as well because it, it says ad above the link in bold. There. You see.

Okay. So let's cross this from our list and move on to the next topic, the most important topic, the three rules we spoke of so highly early. What are they you ask? Well, they're pretty basic actually. You sleep eight hours, eat your fruits and vegetables and drink three litres of water daily. Jokes. But I'll say this. They might not directly guide you to quality SEO, but they'll indirectly improve everything in your life anyway.

Anyway, that that concludes my mother's contribution to today's video. Meanwhile, back in the land of SEO, the number one content is king. That's right, folks, today you attend the coronation of the new reigning monarch of the online kingdom. Content. The first. So in case you snooze through the first video in this chapter, a website is typically composed of pages which are in turn composed of content. So text, images, videos, graphics, etc.. Now, if you were to accuse me of simply lifting this rule from the Google Root book, you'd be entirely correct.

But isn't that the book to lift from if we're going to the Goog? Boys have specifically divulged this better videos, writing photos, and whatever else you like will lead you to a better ranking on the Google charts. And what, you might ask entirely fairly does better mean in this instance, the answer entails two important keywords relevance and quality. So relevance, first of all, is the yes answer to the following questions.

Does my content answer the type of queries I want to be on the business end of all? Right, you need to think about what people search for and try to answer that with your content. If you know internet users are looking for, let's say, what is the Cosiest hotel in winter in Paris and you've got a hotel in Paris in this analogy, by the way. Then what you've got to do is to try to answer that search, by creating a page on your hotel website dedicated to answering it that will describe why your hotel is the cosiest one for a winter stay in Paris.

Right? Following on from this, irrelevance could be broadly defined by you knowing this information and building a similar page built around the word comfortable, for example, that would be irrelevant. Quality is the best possible answer to the question how good is your content? Imagine your content was copy pasted from another site. Now, this is not good quality because Google knows what came first. Quality content is content that you create and recreate on a regular basis. 

So something that is more up to date than what your competitors are showing or approaching. A question everybody attempts to answer with their content, but from a different angle. The best way to make sure your content will be considered as quality content by Google is to regularly answer these questions. Is it unique to me and my business? Is it up to date? Is it targeted to a dedicated topic? Okay, if you answered yes to all of them, you are legitimately on the right track already.

Another thing, call it a subheading. Try to keep it organised. Don't cram ten ideas on one page. Google hates that. For example, if you're building a, page to tell guests things they can do near your hotel, don't include your spa or your restaurant on there. Build a different page and call it our services or something. Now, the only exception to this rule is your homepage. On your homepage, you want to show a little bit about everything visitors can find on your website.

Your hotel is a cinema or a bookshop. And your sweets, spas, breakfast, specials and gym are, you know, the latest releases, movies and books. They're on display on your homepage. So your website is where you keep the trailers for the movies and the blurbs for the books. A little bit of everything, but not too much of anything.

Rule number two is mobile. First, things have changed a lot since the early internet. Families used to send away for a CD, which they'd load onto a car sized desktop hooked up to the house phone, which couldn't be used at the same time. It took a minute or so to connect and made noises like a life support machine trying to find a pulse, but being lazy about it. And if any of you don't know what I'm on about, well then I guess that kind of makes my point for me a bit.

It was a long time ago. These days, let's face it, it's all about the smartphones. This is from Broadband Search DNS. As you can see, in ten years we went from 6% to 56%. And you better start new again these days. Let's face it, it's all about smartphones. This is from Broadband Search dot net. As you can see, in ten years we went from 6% to 56%. And you better believe it's going to keep growing. If I know, then you can be fairly certain that Google is in on the details too.

Which is why they treat mobile first as a crucial SEO policy, which for you means they rank possible answers to search queries on the quality of the mobile versions of your site. So with this in mind, not only should the user experience be perfect for all screen sizes on your site, but you should probably give priority to building the mobile site and then base the versions for bigger screens on that.

Oh yeah, and folks, you should note that Google is not only going to read your content, but check it for usability. It sounds crazy, but it's true. Google has little programs called robots that act as site visitors and wander around your website, clicking on buttons and pressing play on videos, and generally testing that everything that needs to work is working. And once they fill in their little surveys, they ship all the results directly back to Mother Google so they can increase or decrease your search ranking based on them.

Okay. For example. Right. A lot of sites were designed on and for websites and haven't been updated, for example. Right? A lot of sites were designed on and for computer screens and haven't been updated. And so they often feature buttons too small to be clicked on a small screen, or maybe even edged off the screen and impossible to scroll to. The robots will pick up on these and penalise your position accordingly. You have been warned. Respect the robots.

Rule three speed. I've mentioned this already a couple of times. So if it's new to you, please stop skipping videos and go back to the start. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200. Speed is about how long it takes to load your site. When someone clicks on a link to it. There are a heap of free tools out there you can use, but they're they're pretty biased, usually because they tend to be just a version of something they want you to buy, which is fair enough.

But the initial test is definitely not the full package. And why would it be free? The best way to know if your website is loading fast enough is first and foremost, to try it on a few different devices and a few different connection. Try it on multiple devices, multiple internet connections, and then ask your friends and family to do the same and report back to you. By all means, if you fancy to fork out, pay for a test or two. Speed is one of the big SEO rules, and you can't get enough data if you want to optimise yours.

Today. Firstly, we're going to quickly summarise what your website is actually about. Then we're going to run through the three crucial phases. And then I'll detail why you absolutely need to be both architect and inspector of the project. And don't worry, by the time we're through, you'll know exactly what I meant by all of that.

Okay, let's get started with a little talk about your website. So by now, you know that it's the cornerstone of your sales strategy. If you want to generate direct bookings without a website, you do not exist in the direct booking galaxy. It is what holds your whole sales strategy together. You should also know, and you probably do already, that it's a lot more complex than it looks. Not only is it a showcase, but it's also a sales tool. Cash register, if you will. It's your digital store, and its primary goal is to generate revenues. Never forget this point. 

If you understand this, really understand this, you'll understand just how important it is for you to have proper control over your own website. Imagine an independent retailer had no control over their displays, or their floor plan, or their lighting, or even one who had an idea of what they would like. In these regards, but no idea how to achieve it. That would make any sense, would it? Maybe what I just said didn't make any sense. But anyway, it's the same for you. You need to be able to change whenever you want, whenever you want on your digital storefront, because ultimately you need to be able to positively influence your own way how much revenue you're putting away. 

In short, your website is so important to your business that you need to be in control. It's your main source of income. Don't make the mistake of not being able to do what you want with okay, that's it for a what I wanted to remind you of regarding what your website is. Let's cross that off.

Now. Let's look at the three phases of creating a website. To do this will once again compare it with creating, shop. And once again you'll see how similar they are. The first step is to plan the construction. That's when the architect comes in. It's the preparation phase that you are going to see how to execute in the next chapter. This phase is crucial. It's strategic. The decisions taken at this point will impact your business for many moons to come. It's a blueprint from which you build a skyscraper, so it's important to put the work in and get it right.

The second phase is the construction. It's when the worker bees apply what the architect decided for a website. It might be you, a web agency or a freelance website designer. The third step and the last step is the inspection phase. Did the construction worker do the job according to the requirements created by the architect? They didn't. This is when the inspector makes them fix what's wrong.

Now they're fairly straightforward. I'm sure you understand the three steps. So let's cross them off the list. Now, why do you need to be the architect? You could think, well, I have a big budget. I can outsource this part to a web agency. They will do a better job than I will. And all I can say is that would be a big mistake. You and you alone know your property. In and out. You know your clients. You know your sales strategy. You know the flows of your property and its best small, strong benefits. You know your competition. You know the environment in which you operate your property. You know your resources, financial and human and you know your suppliers and so on and so forth. You are the only person that has a global view on your business.

You are also a hospitality professional, a web agency will never have the quantity of input that you have. Your website, in order to perform well, should be built by someone who knows the property like you do. That means that you need to be the architect. You need to decide what to show and how to show it. You need to decide what the end result will look like. This is paramount to your success. I have helped many independent hoteliers in the past that got this point wrong, and did not understand why their website was not generating direct bookings. I actually made this mistake myself by hiring a web agency to create a website for the hotel I was managing. I can tell you that it cost us a lot of money, and we never really saw a satisfactory return on investment. 

Take the time to be the architect, to get into their shoes, learn how they see things, and then construct what you will, because it is a job that will prove itself beyond worthwhile while in the long run. So that should be clear to you. Now let's cross it off the list and let's look at why you also need to be the inspector of the three creation steps.

The second one can be most easily outsourced. Now you don't need to build a website yourself. You can if you like the process, if you are on a small budget, or if you are curious to learn a new skill but you don't have to do it for the end result to be good, so long as you did the planning phase, the last step. However, when someone has to peel their eyes and scrutinise that everything has been done according to plan, nay to your plan that you poured your heart and soul into, there is no one else who suited okay.

You might as well have Ronald McDonald taste test a whopper. How would he even know what a Whopper should taste like? You know, whether you build a website yourself or you outsource it before going live, you need to test everything and you need to double check that it matches the initial requirements. And of course, it's even more important if you outsource the building phase. Now why is that? Because you could choose the best option on the market. Jeff website himself, and he'd lack the total for knowledge you're likely to possess of your own site blueprint. Never mind the motivation that you alone as the property owner, can inject into the project to see that it's done to your exact specifications.

Okay, web agencies are businesses. It's not a crime, but they need to make a profit. Sometimes in order to make more profit, they will take shortcuts with the build. If you don't control the execution and you accept delivery of the website and you only realise that something is wrong later, they won't feel any pressure to fix it. They can only act in bad faith and ask for an additional payment in order to fix it for you. And you think that never happens? Well, guess again because it has happened to me. 

I strongly encourage you to take the time to do both the planning phase and the inspection phase. If you can do the building phase, if you have the will and the means, do that too. It's easier than you think and it's a lot of fun. Besides, if your business allows you to have a budget to outsource, it can also make sense if your time is more valuable per hour than the time of a freelancer and you want to outsource, then by golly, you should outsource. But don't make them all yourself, all right? Just the building phase. The rest of the process would benefit from you as being as hands on as possible.

Right? That's it for this video, as promised, was a short one. In the next chapter, I'm going to make an architect of you. If it's the last thing I do, only time will tell if it'll be Frank Lloyd Wright or Frank Lloyd. Wrong. By now you should have transitioned from speculation to action, and you barely even needed a push out the door. I hope you're knee deep in website foundation plans as I speak. That's the end of this course now, guys. Have a nice day and I'll see you soon.