A hotel's website is a key and indispensable sales channel. So how do some of the leading chains on the planet perform in terms of customer experience and acquisition?

Qubit, website conversion service provider, analyzed eight of the top global hotels for onsite effectiveness and brand awareness: Holiday Inn, Radisson, Hilton Hotels, Marriott International, Best Western, Choice Hotels, Accor Hotels and Starwood Hotels.

The study is divided into two parts: Website analysis and customer acquisition.

1. Website analysis

To analyse these eight hotel sites, Qubit used over 80 industry best practice criteria based on both the industry specifically and general best practice for websites.

Website analysis comprises five main sections: Find, Choose, Buy, Personalize and Mobile. Marriott International emerged as the overall winner.

a. Find

Winner:  Marriott International (89%)

The user journey begins with the Find section, where customers start to look for a hotel that suits them and are first presented with a website.

In this section, Qubit assessed the visual appeal of each hotel’s website, from the layout, to the navigation to the search-friendliness.

Layout

Every hotel assessed in this benchmark ensured that their logo was clearly displayed, and the purpose of their website was easily understood.

Some websites clearly indicated their log-in by having it in a decent size and in the top right corner. However, others such as Choice Hotels and Holiday Inn did not. Most of the websites made good use of offers. Some were particularly effective, including ‘join and earn a free night’ on the Marriott homepage.

Surprisingly, Accor had a special offers box that was blank and that Holiday Inn was missing any offers.

Most also had very well-formatted homepages, with trust and credibility established at first glance. It is important for websites to have a contact number for customer support visible at all times, hotels such as Starwood Hotels and Marriott International did this very well.

Others such as Radisson only offered a contact us button at the bottom of the homepage and not a number, which did not make this clear.

Navigation

The use of breadcrumbs in aiding the customer in their search is another useful tool in making a user journey more friendly. However, this was not used effectively by most of the websites.

Only Holiday Inn, Marriott International and Accor were successful because you could view your journey at the top of the page and easily see your click path.

Not all of the websites had drop-down or fly-out menus when you hover over a subcategory. This is a useful tool to aid navigation and websites such as Choice Hotels and Best Western could really benefit from this.

Search

All eight hotels had a search tool for users to find a hotel. However, only Hilton Hotels and Radisson had a general search for the site – although the search on the Radisson website failed to work, so it was not a useful functionality.

Marriott International did offer different searches for each subcategory, this is useful for a user looking for a particular meeting room or deal.

All of the hotels except for Starwood Hotels and Resorts have a predictive search facility. It was particularly impressive that Accor Hotels started predicting after just one letter was entered.

Choice Hotels was the least effective hotel assessed, scoring 41%, due to its homepage being fairly cluttered and lacking some key features such as a search function and smooth drop down menus.

b. Choose

Winner:  Marriott International (84%)

Qubit focused on the effectiveness of the search function and the product pages provided by each hotel’s website.

Search results

Key features such as predictive search and being able to apply filters to search results can improve the visitor experience and, in turn, customer satisfaction.

The search on the Best Western site is not particularly effective. For example when typing in ‘Paris, France’ no results appeared when in fact there is a Best Western in Paris. For Paris to show on the results it requires you to search ‘Paris, Paris, France’ specifically which is very impractical and not entirely user–friendly.

It is also useful to have images on the search results page that can be clicked on to access the product. Not all of the hotels had this, for example, Starwood Hotels and Resorts would show enlarged images when clicked on instead of taking you to the description page, which would be much more useful.

Product pages

Multiple images of the rooms and facilities were displayed by all hotels, which is very useful for users making a decision on where they want to stay.

The images that were provided were generally good, being of high quality and providing a good overview of the hotel.

The product descriptions provided by the hotels were typically informative enough, however, some were unnecessarily long.

Prominent calls-to-action were given by every website (‘book now’ for instance), many creating a good sense of urgency through both colour and size.

c. Buy

Winner: Hilton Hotels (89%)

The final stage in a user’s journey is the Buy section where the online transaction is completed. For this stage of the journey, websites can benefit from elements such as clear formatting of the summary page and all details of the package given to the customer.

Summary page

Every hotel assessed had a well-formatted summary page, ensuring that the information displayed was easy to understand. However, in some cases such as with the Holiday Inn, the price would be stated as an estimated price which could be misleading.

Not all of the hotels show subtotals that are free from additional charges – when booking a hotel in Paris with Choice Hotels there is an additional charge of £7.52 with no clarity on what this charge is for.

Checkout and registration

All of the hotels made sure that only necessary fields were included, making the page easy to understand. Most of the hotels, apart from Holiday Inn, which only had one stage, had clearly labelled all the stages of the checkout. This aids the user in their final step of the process.

Most hotels accepted the usual methods of payment and had a clear cancellation policy available, leaving no room for confusion.

d. Personalize

Winner: Marriott International (79%)

Qubit assessed the level of technology used by each hotel, as well as how well they are using it. By using the right technology, websites can personalize the service provided to different visitors.

This is a key tool in driving conversions fast and achieving a competitive advantage when more and more online retailers are turning to personalization. 75% of visitors are more likely to return to a site that recognizes them.

Recent studies have also found a direct link between conversion rates and personalization. However, on average, two in five companies don’t target any customer or visitor segments to create a website experience.

In order to effectively personalize, retailers need to have five key components in place on their websites:

• Analytics: Tools with which to measure behavior on your website.
• Tag management: Technology to structure and simplify your data collection.
• Onsite widgets and social plugins: Offer visitors the ability to interact with the company and each other.
• Testing and targeting platforms: Optimize your website and drive a significant, sustainable uplift in conversions by personalizing for individual segments.

Ideally, websites should have all of these technologies as they are complementary to each other. To evaluate the level of technology adoption on each website, Qubit used the online tools Ghostery and BuiltWith to detect the existence of third-party tags.

These tools work by categorizing a library of third-party technologies on a website, and then flagging them whenever you visit the site. Qubit examined whether the eight hotels are using these technologies to their full potential, seeing if they include a recommendation engine and targeted messaging during a typical user journey.

All eight hotels used some form of analytics, from Google Analytics to something more advanced, such as Coremetrics, and most hotels use a tag management system.

The average for this section was 61%, the lowest in this benchmark. This might be due to the fact that personalizing for visitors is still evolving.

e. Mobile

Winner: Marriott International (84%)

In this final stage of ‘Website analysis’, Qubit looked at the mobile sites provided.

This section provided the highest average of 75%, with Marriott International scoring the highest at 84%.

This hotel cleverly directs user to an app that one can navigate to from the mobile site. This is a great tool to increase potential subscriptions. The design of the mobile site is streamlined, simple and clean with user-friendly links.

Hilton Hotels came in at second place with 83%. Starwood Hotels was the only hotel that did not have a mobile site, this meant that the design was not user friendly for those on mobiles and it was difficult to navigate.

2. Customer acquisition

Qubit assessed the hotels’ presence across four main social platforms, and their presence on key industry term search results on Google. This was to assess how well the hotels are positioned to drive awareness and engagement with their brand, before visitors even land on their sites.

a. Google Search Results

With five keyterms - hotel, hotel rooms, hotels, hotel booking sites, discount hotel rates - Qubit assessed each hotel on their search results presence.

When a keyterm was typed into Google.com, Qubit looked at where the hotels appeared on the first ten pages. The numbers in the table are the positions that each website appeared in when googling each keyword.

When a website optimizes its web content to appear in search engine results, it is a message to potential customers that the website content provides valuable information about the search topic.

Across all five keyterms, Marriott International is the only hotel to rank for them all, Choice Hotels ranks particularly well on the four keyterms that it does appears on.

Only Choice hotels achieved a ranking on the first page which is very impressive as most of the highest rankings are websites specializing in hotel deals such as hotels.com and Priceline.

b. Social presence

Qubit looked at social presence of the hotels across four top social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

In the ‘social presence’ analysis, it was Marriott International and Hilton Hotels that achieved first place, between them scoring highest over all of the social platforms.

Conclusion

Marriott International was the clear winner of the ‘Website analysis’ section, but shared first place with Hilton Hotels in the ‘social presence’ analysis.

However Marriott International is the overall winner when it fought back in the Google search section ranking particularly high for all five key terms.

NB: Website user image via Shutterstock.