A recurrent theme through these pages has been the desire of hotels, whether chains and independents, to capture an increased share of the rapidly growing online travel market. Either for strategic or more frequently for distribution cost reasons, most hotels want to drive more bookings through their own direct Brand.com websites.

Unfortunately achieving this is quite difficult. Over the past decade, online travel agencies have continually been more successful than brand website at both capturing and converting the customer, with the end result that most online hotel bookings flow through indirect channels.  In most European countries, indirect bookings currently make up two-third of hotel’s online business, and this proportion is in general growing despite the best efforts of the hotel chains.

What then are hotels doing wrong?  The answer (in most cases) is nothing.  Most have adequate websites, featuring attractive photos and well written copy text, and include appropriate booking facilities to allow customers to complete the transaction if they so wish. The challenge is not that hotels are doing something wrong, just that they are not doing enough.  Adequate is no longer sufficient:  to successfully compete in today’s electronic marketplace, websites have to be better than adequate.

And one word summarizes superior websites – content.  Content is the text, photos, video and functionality that we include on our website, and at the end of the day it’s this search for content that motivates most people to use the web.Having the right content insures that websites appear prominently in search engine results listings and are thus seen by the potential customer.  OTAs have long understood this, and focused on consolidating vast amounts of content, organizing it hierarchically to aid indexing by search engine spiders.  In addition the development of travel orientated social networks (for example TripAdvisor by Expedia Inc. and iGoUGo by Travelocity) was at least partially motivated by the ease with which such systems could generate vast amounts of unique, frequently updated  content at a relatively low cost.

In addition having the right content helps convert the customer, turning lookers into bookers.  The main challenge with the majority of hotel industry websites is that they are lacking in appropriate and adequately targeted content.  Written for generalist audience, most try to be everything to everybody and end up being nothing to anybody.

Such websites typically include minimal amounts of text, making them difficult to index, and whatever is included could best be described as ‘inoffensive’ – unlikely to discourage anyone but at the same time also unlike to drive sales.  In most companies coming up with the text narratives is like drawing blood from a stone, with the result that once written these property, rate and package descriptions tend to be re-used again and again on multiple online (and sometimes offline) channels.

Once again OTAs have a deeper understanding of the importance of the role that content plays in converting the customer.  In addition to having more, and better organized, content, many of the major OTAs take the basic text given to them by hoteliers and rewrite it into more focused, sales orientated language (or, more frequently, languages).  Similarly they frequently supplement the meager images supplied by hotels with photos gleamed from multiple sources, making their presentation of the hotel richer and more attractive than that found on the brand.com website.

Thus consumers looking at properties on OTA sites frequently get a more comprehensive, better organized, image of the hotel that they can get from the Band.com website.  Coupled with OTAs strengths in merchandising, it’s no wonder that conversion rates at OTA sites frequently run at double those of their hotel chain website competitors.

How then can hotel companies compete?  The answer is still one word – content.  Content drives search.  Content drives conversion.  Comprehensive, well structured, frequently updated, precisely targeted unique content is the key to competing effectively online.  To be successful hotels need to invest heavily in developing and strategically managing their content.

The big challenge with identifying killer content is that it is different for different people.  What is killer for me may be filler for you.  To create killer content, hotels have to intimately understand their customers, and create sites and / or pages that specifically address their information and functionality needs.  One size fits all simply does not work – information and facilities need to be precisely targeted towards specific groups of customers.

Some of the most successful players in hotel distribution understand this, and have created niche websites to supplement their generalist brand.com offering.  For example Marriott has registered a large variety of different sites, including MarriottMeetings.com, MarriottVacations.com and MarriottRewards.com, in each case routing the visitor towards highly targeted portions of their core website, featuring unique key content aimed at those segments.

Developing (and redeveloping) content is a lot of work, but it’s only by focusing on the content that the customer wants that hotels can effectively compete in today’s electronic marketplace.