OT - Internet and on-line booking questions for the group

Jay Honeck wrote:

snip

Because of this rather shocking statistic I instantly redesigned our webpage
so that the home page is smaller and opens more quickly. (According to what
Frontpage was telling me, it would have taken several minutes to open over a
28.8 modem!) It never dawned on me to design the page for dial-up, because
I thought slow connections were on there way out!


Over the past 12 hours, the advice that keeps coming up is "make the opening
page simple and clear." That's been the rule for web page design since the
beginning (unfortunately, often ignored). Put you fancy stuff on other pages
and warn them the link contains graphics or large download or uses Flash or
whatever.

Think of it like someone calling the hotel. How long a message should you have
with how much information before you tell them how to push a number and go into
voice message maze? You don't, right.

I have a 28.8 modem and a 486 PC with a 1MB video card. Anything that doesn't
load in about 30 seconds, I move on unless I'm really interested. Then I stop a
about 90 seconds. Your home page took 35 seconds to complete but the text was
on and the graphic was painting before that.


snip

An ON-LINE BOOKING question for the group, if you please:
**************************************************
I am about to sign a contract with a company that will provide us with
real-time, on-line reservation and GDS support for hotels.

What you are saying (and in some of your responses to comments) is that you are
buying advertising and marketing to publicize the hotel and, hopefully, get more
bookings. You are not buying just online reservation. You need to price what
it would take to just use a reservation package on your own site and subtract
that from your "contract" price. Then you can determine if the advertising you
are putting out (the amount left after subtracting) is what you want to spend
and will it get you the return you want (amount of additional bookings you want
to have).

BTW, I see you are a member of IOWA B&B Guild. If you just want online booking,
pool your resources with other members and setup a link through them. There's
many a B&B that does that. And yes, you must establish a process of making sure
you check that online booking is sent to you in a specific time, guaranteed, so
you don't end up with double booking. Either that or have a disclaimer with the
online booking that it is subject to availability and will be confirmed with a
return e-mail from the hotel. These are little gotchas that I've seen drive
guests and keepers mad.

Online booking is not used as much as online searching. So it's important to be
able to find the hotel first and know basics even if not from the hotel's web
site. Your return guests, or any past guests, would be the source of most of
your online bookings because they know you and want to come back. Check with
them if they gave you an e-mail. Their advice may be even better that those
just flying around :-)

snip

Thanks for your help! (Your reward for helping me is getting to view this
goofy new video, forwarded to me by a British pilot. It's yet another in a
series of bizarre ads for Ford automobiles that apparently works to sell
cars in Britain. See it at:
http://alexisparkinn.com/photogaller...rd_sportka.wmv Here's
another one from the series, almost aviation related:
http://alexisparkinn.com/photogaller...s/BirdGone.mpg )
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Thanks, Dan

What you are saying (and in some of your responses to comments) is that
you are
buying advertising and marketing to publicize the hotel and, hopefully,
get more
bookings. You are not buying just online reservation. You need to price
what
it would take to just use a reservation package on your own site and
subtract
that from your "contract" price. Then you can determine if the
advertising you
are putting out (the amount left after subtracting) is what you want to
spend
and will it get you the return you want (amount of additional bookings you
want
to have).

I looked into "stand-alone" software packages that would allow me to do
real-time on-line booking from my own website -- and the price was WAY
higher than contracting with the big players in the market. And I'm not
talking a little higher -- I'm talking like 500 to 1000% higher.

And I'd STILL not be in the global distribution system (which gets you into
all of the travel agent's computers) or on Expedia and Travelocity.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"