Booking is the keyword

The article "Booking is the Keyword" deals with the importance for hotels to have their own websites. Indeed, they enable these type of businesses to attract bookings. However, these only work if they are efficient; this means being "search engines friendly" (the website has at the top of the major search engines), being appealing to internet users (eg. they should grab attention and attract the potential customers by giving the right informations at the right places so that the internet user doesn't get lost or invaded with too much informations he doesn't need, as well as include a booking form that is secure with instant confirmation).

Yield management is about reaching the right customer, at the right time with the right product through the right channel. Indeed, if those channels fail to give the customer satisfaction, why shouldn't the product?

Nowadays, more and more people book their hotel rooms on-line. Websites have therefore become major informative and selling tools. In the sense that most people use search engines to find a product, or a hotel for instance, if this one doesn't come up when typing in certain keywords than, once more, this channel is a failure.

The other issue that is raised in this article concerns the attractiveness of those websites. If this one doesn't instantly provide the internet user with the information he is looking for than he will just look for another hotel. This implies that the configuration of a website is key to making people book online.

Moreover it has to be easy to use in order to not loose a booking.

This article demonstrates that having a website is worthwhile but if it is not thought throught properly, it is of no use. All the different stages dealt with above have their importance in succesfully turning a potential customer into -a- customer. They do make a difference on whether potential customers are to book or not.

Nevertheless, even though it is perfectly understandable that it is the job of a website to ease the booking process, how can hotel position itself at the top of a search engine site when most of the key words are likely to be the same when one is looking for a hotel in Tokyo per say? Do deals exist between hotels and google for example?