No Bookings Help! Saturday, 30 January 2010

Tourism Site Fix performs admin on a number of Tourism portals and I recently received an email from a worried business owner (not a TSF client) an accommodation provider as it happens who is advertising on a client website, but this could apply to virtually any business selling goods or services on the internet.

She asks...

“I just wondered if you could tell me what the enquiry levels are like for my property please?  We have no bookings and I was just wondering if there are enquiries which are not converting or whether the enquiry level is zero.  Also, how are we comparing with other similar businesses?  Is there anything we can do to improve our booking levels?

I hope you don't mind me asking you”.

My reply goes like this...

Your enquiries!  Yes we do offer it frequently to enquirers but no take up. People will probably take it as time goes on and alternatives become scarce.

Yesterday we offered it for 4 week to someone, I phoned you to ask for discount but you weren’t there so I left a message, but you obviously didn’t get my message and the customer has no doubt booked elsewhere as we weren’t able to offer discount without your say so, quite understandably they didn’t hang around waiting for answers.

I must stress that enquiries need to be answered quickly or you will lose potential customers. 

The last few weeks have been substantially down in site visitors to all our websites, due to Christmas holidays and then the snow that seemed to cripple the whole of the UK. This situation is however changing as in the last 2 weeks site visits have risen sharply across the board as people turn their attention to the summer hols. so looking better in the short term.

Some property letting business owners are doing very well and the reason being that, they have nice descriptive write ups, they have professional quality photographs inside and out, they take time to communicate with customers and enquirers. They are almost all advertising on several websites to increase take up, they offer Value For Money.

I am not criticising the property quality but from what I can see from your web entry the quality of the pictures and property description is very poor. Look, you offer a sofa bed, which we have also done in the past. I don’t know if you have ever slept on a Sofa bed but generally they are extremely uncomfortable! Yet you actually charge £10 extra for its use!   You can’t win customers with deals like that, not these days. This year looks like it could be difficult for many owners so you have to make sure your apartment is marketed better than the average. It costs I know but in difficult times you have to increase marketing rather than cut it.

I can help in all these things if you want me to, with pictures, with writing page copy, with marketing - don’t be afraid to ask.  Just look at some of the other accommodation properties around to see what you need to do to improve things. Finally the main thing is not to panic, bookings will start to happen if you hold your nerve and when all the other quality properties are fully booked. But unless you do something about improving the quality and Value For Money of your product, none will return to you next year.

Technorati Tags: Marketing,photography,copy writing

Why I was working all over Christmas and the New Year Wednesday, 20 January 2010

Now you know why I was working all over Christmas and the New Year. I was working away on my new Tourism Site Fix website which has now changed from asp to php! Hopefully the changes will not cause the loss of any of my search engine rankings especially my longstanding Google #1 position for “Tourism website design” the 301 redirects will help everything settle down smoothly.

Launched today! 20th January 2010 It has been a marathon, just transferring each page across to the new template took forever. To compound it all, like spring cleaning, it’s only when you look closely you see how everything has got dusty! Well in terms of my website it all looked dated so I need to go through all of it with a fine tooth comb to weed out the old and update with some new stuff.

Notably new is of course Social Media, a term that hadn’t been thought of when TSF mark 1 was made. I have also done a little on site offering for a number of fixed price optimisation packages specifically for small business websites, especially in the tourism accommodation sector. I do plan to use my website from now on, keep it updated and not neglected it as so many busy professional people websites are!
Thanks for your help with the changes Steve I am eternally grateful.

How many businesses get their first website wrong? Friday, 1 January 2010

Some folks would think it sad me sitting here on New Years eve writing a Blog, but what the hell, the snow is a foot deep outside, the Hogmanay celebrations are all cancelled and the TV has been out because our satellite is covered in snow!!
I was just wondering how many businesses get their first website all wrong?  my own first site although it looked ok was a disaster really, as at that time I was a total newbie it was my first website on my first PC and the web guy I went to see about my holiday cottage site just bombarded me with jargon. I remember he persuaded me to eagerly buy 4 domain names like this: selfcateringholidaycottagesonscotland.com he told me the keywords in the name would bring me lots of business! He also did a nice tune that played whenever the homepage was open, and I couldnt even turn it off yuk yuk yuk. I will give this some more thought and continue the post tomorrow. On second thoughts I think I will have a break tomorrow!