Stages of the Booking Process: Planning S2E1

Foreign. Welcome to the Boost Hospitality Podcast. My name is Mark Simpson. I'm the founder of Boost Hospitality, or Boostly for short. This podcast is all about working with small independent hospitality owners, helping them increase their heads on beds, cutting down on commission costs, and just getting a better understanding how marketing for their Property works in 2017. For those of you who listen to series one of the Boost Hospitality podcast, thank you very much for coming back for series two. In this short five episodes series, I'm going to cover the five stages of the booking process that a guest goes through before booking at your property. Each episode is available to download now, so you can go to itunes or Stitcher, Spotify, SoundCloud, any of the podcasts and you can download all five right now. As always, I would love to hear your feedback on the Boost Hospitality podcast. If you'd like to email, it's markoostly.co.uk or you can go straight to our Facebook page, which is facebook.comBoostlyUK before you leave, I would really appreciate a review on itunes. If you can head over there now, leave your feedback, leave your star rating number five if you like. That would be really appreciative because that's the only way that we're going to get this podcast seen by the wider world. Stage one of the booking process is plan. So what is this? This is quite simply when anybody starts their hotel or bed and breakfast or holiday cottage booking stage, they go to Google or they go to a search engine. Now, I'm not talking about here, where people go straight to a website. These are people who don't know where they want to stay. They just have an idea on a town or a city where they would like to either visit for a few days, visit for a night or go for a long stay. So what they do, the planning stage, is all about finding a potential property that they would like to spend some money in. And this is what you can do right now to make sure that they can find your property over everybody else. So, for example, someone goes onto Google and types in places to stay in insert town or name nine out of 10 times the big booking engines online travel agents are going to come up here. So booking.com, expedia, TripAdvisor, Trivago, Lateroom, hotels.com, airbnb, you name it, they are going to appear here. So to fight with these guys, it's going to be really hard. So what you can do is instead of trying to paddle upstream, go with the flow and get on these websites, make sure that you've got a listing on all of these sites. Now if you're struggling to think of which ones are the ones to go on, just go onto Google and do a search. Do a search in your town, in your area, type in if you're a hotel, hotels in insert town or name if you're a holiday cottages, rental property, bed and breakfast, guest house, you name it, type it in into Google and find out what the top 10 listings are. And get on those websites. Make sure you get a nice picture, make sure you get a good description, make sure you've got everything in there, but just get on these properties. That is the main thing about plan is that when somebody is doing a search, doesn't matter where they go, your name, your property, your picture, your is on all of these sites. The other key thing to bear in mind at this point is that you're going to get people searching online for some very vague like hotels in insert town or name for example. But you're also going to get people that are searching that have got more of a niche. So they could need disabled facilities, they could need property that they can bring their pet, they might need secure car parking because they've got a really expensive car or a bike that they need. So you've got to make sure that you're appealing to these people as well. So what you need to do is again go onto Google or Bing or one of the search engines and type in what your unique selling, your usp basically your unique selling property is for a customer. So for example, the property that I run with my family is the granary is a farm stay property in North Yorkshire. So I made sure that on our website we've got the keywords in the right places for farm stay property. If you are a hotel that is by the seafront that has got amazing sea views and that's your usp. Then make sure that on your website and again work with your website designer on this. Make sure that your unique selling point is is everywhere on your website. So for example, you could have disabled accommodation in Whitby, you could have hotel with sea views in Filey, whatever it is, make sure that your USP is crystal clear on your website in the keywords and then it'll have a better chance of appearing on that first page on Google. This is called long tail keywords. So if you can crack that as well as appearing on all of the listing sites, then you'll get more chance of getting a guest to be clicking on you. So just to recap, stage number one of the booking process is plan. This is where a potential guest or customer will come onto the search engines to look for a place to stay in a town or city that they want to go to. So the main things that you have to focus on right now is being seen in the key areas and also as well make sure that you're targeting people whether they're searching for a short tail keyword or a long tail keyword. So for example, hotels in Scarborough is a short tail. Make sure that you are on the big listing sites like booking.com and Expedia, Laterooms, TripAdvisor, trivago. Make sure you've got a listing on all of those sites and also as well make sure that your website is talking about your unique selling points. So if it's a pet friendly property in Scarborough, make sure you get that. If it's a disabled hospitality accommodation in York, again make sure that all those keywords are on your website. You're going to get seen in the places where a guest is starting their search.

Thank you for listening to the Boost Hospitality podcast. I've created a free ebook to go alongside inside this podcast series. To claim your copy, all you need to do is go to boostle.co.uk podcast2 and that's the number two. And as always, Boost Lee is spelt B O O S T L Y. My name has been Mark Simpson. Thank you so much for listening. I'd love to hear your feedback. Tweet me UK.