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swagobjectwinner · 3 years

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10 WAYS TO LOSE GUESTS QUICKLY – MISTAKES TO AVOID

There are countless ways to lose a guest. While you can’t fix them all, here are some of the most common ones to avoid.

1. Inflexible cancellation policy

Flexible bookings and having the ability to cancel a booking is critical to win the trust of your guests. In this environment where an accentuated Covid-19 outbreaks and lockdowns are unpredictable, guests need to know they can book advance and not lose their money if they can’t make it due to reasons beyond their control.

2. Not promoting your health & hygiene policy

Sticking with the pandemic theme, how you manage the health and hygiene practices on your property, if you are abiding by all required guidelines and making sure guests are aware of these updates is important. No one wants to stay in a hotel that doesn’t meet the minimum safety guidelines recommended by the government. Make sure your experience is as contactless as possible – from check-in to check-out.

3. Poor Customer Service by Staff

Over time staff can (understandably) grow tired and the demands of the industry make it difficult to smile every day. To top it off, there is a pandemic that is affecting the lives and livelihood of everyone – staff included. Sometimes these frustrations come out – unintentionally – on guests. However, they leave a lasting impression on the guest. Make sure you keep talking to your staff, motivating them and staying connected to avoid a bad guest experience.

4. Poor Wi-Fi and entertainment system

It’s a small thing, but in this digital-first world, nothing annoys a guest more than Wi-Fi that keeps dropping off. Worse still, Wi-Fi that never connects! Beef up your bandwidth and provide a seamless connection for your guests. A good entertainment is another winner with guests.

5. Lack of personalisation

Delivering a personalised guest experience is at the heart of winning them for life. Think about, as a hotelier you see a number of guests every day. However, for your guest your hotel is a totally new experience. They must be treated like they matter – like you know them. This is possible if you understand their interests and needs. Spend time in your channel manager, PMS and other tools with analytics to understand your guests and personalise their stay.

Did you know you can deliver personalised mails, upsell deals and add ons with STAAH Upselling partners? Find out more here

6. Not keeping track of your reviews

Guests want to be heard. If they’ve spent time to leave you a review, read it and respond. Good or bad, the feedback must be taken on board if you want to improve your experience.

You can monitor all your reviews from an online reputation management system like STAAH ReviewMinder. Find out more here

7. Poor bedding and pillows

A guest needs a good night’s sleep if you want them to return. This begins with comfortable pillows and bedding. Some smart hoteliers even offer pillow menus so guests can pick out one that is closest to their need.

8. Poor plumbing

An extension of the above really. Leaky taps that don’t let you sleep, showers with poor water pressure, blocked drains and toilets with questionable flushes … none of these should be things your guests discover. Do regular checks of your bathrooms to ensure all plumbing is working as expected.

9. Not showing sufficient love for the environment

Increasingly guests are conscious of the environmental cost of services a hotel provides. Over-laundering, not using sustainable or eco packaging and products, lack of recycling … all these are factors that leave modern guests a bit disappointed and seeking out another property with better environmental ethics.

Sustainability in hotels – Read the tips

10. Exaggerating the experience

Marketer Seth Godin once said, “All marketers are storytellers; only the losers are liars”. Don’t exaggerate your property’s experience to attract guests. If the reality does not match, it leaves guests very disappointed.

What are the small mistakes you’ve made that have had a big impact on your guests? Negative or positive, we’d like to hear about it at marketing@ staah.com

Read our latest hospitality tips and trends

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swagobjectwinner · 3 years

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Importance of Evergreen Content for your Hotel Website

Guest writer Cooper Jitts from TALK Agency shares the importance of Evergreen content in today’s time and why its important for a hotel website to increase conversions.

In the world of SEO and growth marketing, trending content is like a spring flower. It blooms quickly, attracts a flurry of visitors, then wilts and disappears forever. On the flip side, evergreen content is a camellia. It grows strong and steady, blooming throughout the year while attracting a steady stream of new and returning visitors. Which would you rather see on your hotel website?

Since the start of the pandemic, trends have been taking centre stage. But these trends have been focussed on doom and gloom. Then there’s the fact these are trends. They won’t generate interest forever. In fact, most people have had enough of them already.

However, if you build a content strategy focusing on evergreen content, you’ll soon enjoy year-round interest that carries on working for you long after it has been published. Unlike trending content, evergreen content helps you establish your authority, boosts your organic reach and can launch you up the search rankings, saving you time and money, year on year.

Why Is Evergreen Content Important?

If you take business growth seriously, then you’ll already know smart marketing plays a huge role in your success. The more people you reach, the more likely you are to see those lead conversions rise. However, reaching the right people is more important than reaching the most people – and establishing yourself as an authority in your industry (hospitality industry) or niche will build trust in your brand. But to summarise, here are 5 reasons why you need evergreen content in your life.

1 – Rank Higher In The Search Engines

As evergreen content tends to be informative, educational, always relevant and timeless, it typically performs better in the SERPs. By filling it with useful information about your property and room types along with the local tourist attractions, site seeing and food joints etc. will add more value. In this way, you’re likely to get more visibility, and it will help you climb those search engine results pages. The more content and value your site would provide, the lower the bounce rate will be – another major ranking factor.

2 – Boost Site Visitors And Traffic

With 95% of all traffic going to websites on page one of Google and Bing, just 5% venture to page two and beyond. Evergreen content and clean visuals tend to rank higher, it helps in attracting new visitors and reaching out to a wider audience. Evergreen content will also usually have a much higher word count, making it easier to use keywords and latent semantic indexing naturally. The more traffic you drive to your website – there are more chances of driving some commission-free direct bookings and increase profitability.

3 – Gain More Leads And Conversions

Every visitor to your site is a potential guest, meaning the more visitors you attract, the more guests you could drive. You could have the best conversion strategy known to man, but without leads it’s worthless. Increase efforts on lead generation with social media outreach, email campaigns, blogs etc.

4 – Builds Site Trust And Authority

By providing reliable and informative content, evergreen content is generally shared much more on social media than generic trending topics. The fact it offers so much value and info also helps you establish your hotel business or brand as an industry leader, someone to trust. Share travel stories of your guests, reward them for their posting reviews, sharing pictures and videos. Your happy customers could help you in building trust. Basically, the more trustworthy you come across as; the more likely you are to drive more guests.

5 – Works For You Long After It’s Published

Trends typically die a quick death, meaning most content is lost in the darkest corners of the SERPs. Why spend hours pulling together a post that will generate interest for a few weeks when you could create something that works months, years, even decades after it’s published? Ultimately, this drives consistent traffic to your site, helping reinforce all other aspects of business growth both in the short term and the long.

The Different Types Of Evergreen Content for accommodation providers:

So, we’ve briefly covered why evergreen content is important for businesses. Now let’s take a quick look at the different types of it you can create. You’ll probably be familiar with some of these, which is always a good thing as you’ll have a good idea of the direction to go.

(Can we link the below to our content assets? Like the Airbnb guide, other relevant blogs etc.)

Checklists (If you are a VR owner or Airbnb Host) Common Mistakes Glossary of a Topic or Subject How-To Guides (Travel and Local info) Property Videos Stay Reviews Stay Resources & Ideas Step by Step Instructions Top Tips and Top Tens Ultimate Guide To

Now while these types of content won’t necessarily see you gain instant evergreen status, the ways in which they are structured and written can. As an example, if you’re into a holiday or leisure business, you could write a post about the top 10 surfing beaches to visit in Sydney. Or perhaps you sell garden tools, in which case you could do an ultimate guide to getting a perfect lawn.

Think of how to deliver all of your knowledge, tips and advice to your audience in an educational yet entertaining way. Avoid using ‘trend techniques’ and add as much verifiable value as you can. Guide them from start to finish naturally, and of course, be relatable. How To Create Evergreen Content

1 – Streamline Your Subjects

Keeping your scope specific to the topic at hand is always better than going too broad with your info. Evergreen content is supposed to be useful and assist the reader with a specific subject matter. Going off-topic will likely drive them away. By zoning in on one or two important points, you can become an expert on the subject, gaining the reader’s trust along the way.

Always keep your audience in mind while developing content, know your guest profile and accordingly choose the Subject. Choose a catchy title and begin with a great engaging intro, incorporate relevant pictures and videos to make it effective.

2 – Use Relevant Keywords & Lsi’s

When creating content, you need to write for humans first, and search engines second. But that doesn’t mean one should be sacrificed for the other. Remember, ranking higher in search results is important but the content has been drafted for your guests to read. Weaving keywords and LSIs into content in a natural way can be hard – and the search engines know when your keyword spamming, using irrelevant links or being a clickbait creator. Yep. You don’t just need to know which keywords to target. You need to be able to use them naturally, building context and convincing the reader at the same time.

3 – Join The-Dots By Linking Content

Evergreen content works like mycelium. The forest floor is connected via a network of branching, thread-like fungi, each working to help the forest thrive. In return, the trees provide nutrition to the mycelium in a symbiotic relationship. This is the same for the content you create. Use your past and future content to provide context, back up what you say and drive your audience from one section to another. Do this and you’ll not only improve your ranking – but also your brand authority and trust scores. Interlinking within web pages will keep the guests engaged – create a lot of content and build a structured architecture for your website. For e.g.: If you are providing spa services at your property and having a webpage dedicated to the same, then you may provide links to other sections of your website where the guests may experience services such as: yoga, aerobics and wellness.

About the Guest writer

This article has been written by Cooper Jitts. Cooper is the Founder and Director of Talk Agency, a digital marketing company that provides white-hot service to clients while keeping on top of emerging digital trends.

#evergreen hotelwebsite content

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