Hotel websites and online travel agents. They sell the same product yet their websites look completely different. They are chalk and cheese, black and white, Tom and Jerry. What gives?
In very broad terms, OTAs tend to be cleaner and calmer while a couple of the hotel websites I visited were …. busy. Lot of movement with continually rotating promotions. In many cases the splash page shouted and screamed. Big photographs of people everywhere. Not rooms. Strange.
Primary colours and headlines fighting for attention. Look at me!
A good example of this approach is the new Rydges.com, pictured below:
There are 11 photographs in that screen grab. That’s a lot. And just count the colours.
That photo montage rotates with a series of other promotions pushing various aspects of the Rydges offering.
It’s certainly dynamic but for some perhaps a little distracting.
A similar approach – that is the dynamic promotions through the main display – has been adopted by Oaks Hotels & Resorts.
Mantra has opted something a little different using only photographs of brand ambassador Pat Rafter.
Not a single room or location shot.
In total there are five images of the former tennis star on the splash page, including two video stills.
It’s kind of odd. I accept he’s a good looking guy but he doesn’t come with the room.
Now let’s take a look at Australian OTA market leader Wotif.com.
A static site with no images, apart from the ski ad in the left column, just a booking engine and links down the right column.
There’s very little difference between this page and another screen grab I took two years ago.
Why? Because it works.
This site sold 7 million room night in the 2011/12 financial year.
To conclude, here is a screen grab of Booking.com, the very successful and fast-growing international web site.
Yes, there are a few images but each one of them is a room with no people, or a destination shot.
The images are also attached to an offer and once again it is a static site.
Booking engine front and centre.
Many millions of rooms would be sold through this site each year.
So why the difference between the OTA and hotel sites?
I can’t explain it but will say that one side could probably learn from the other.
And think you know which side I mean.
ends.
Interesting comparison, and I agree that the ‘accommodation search’ needs to be the hero across all of these sites. I also agree that the hotel sites can improve across the board and learn from the simplicity of OTA’s.
However I think the Hotel sites have a more comprehensive communications role to play than the OTA’s. The website for a hotel group is the primary branding, marketing, customer service, and sales tool of the organisation and has to wear a few more hats than the sales-only focus of the OTAs.
Google research in 2010 suggests that travelers visited an average of 22 sites before deciding on a destination to book with online. So I think its important that Hotels look different to OTA’s, to provide far more specific information to the guest about the uniqueness of their product. You don’t want every online travel site to look identical… you go to different sites for different reasons. You go to an OTA to do a comparison search, you go to the Hotel site because you recognise the brand, or you want specfic details that the OTA’s can’t deliver.
The problem I think you identify is that everyone is tending to copy each other. OTA’s mirror themselves on other OTA’s and Hotels mirror other Hotel sites. This is diluting the brand messages for everyone.
I know when we redesigned our site 2 years ago it looked different and stood out from the crowd, but as the site gets older, it seems to look & function like more and more of our competitor’s sites. Its a hard cycle to break, as when you finally get budget and resource to redesign your website, you look at the best competitor sites that are out there and try to learn from what they do well.
Its not a problem that is isolated to travel sites, You can apply this theory across the board, and see the same patterns playing out on websites across all industries (including blogs, like this one 🙂
But to come back around to your point… yes, the ‘accommodation search’ must be the hero of Hotel sites, and there is plenty of room for us hoteliers to make improvements.