Trip Advisor each month attracts more than 25 million visitors, has five million registered members and 10 million reviews and opinions. These statistics alone, demonstrate that in today’s connected world, the options of others are not only being given, but being listened to and taken into account when making a purchasing decision. The power of customer reviews and customer feedback cannot be ignored and in fact should be embraced. BUT! What happens if you get bad reviews…..? Won’t that... Read Full Story

am·bi·ance also am·bi·ence  (ām’bē-əns, äɴ-byäɴs’)  n.   The special atmosphere or mood created by a particular environment It’s pretty obvious that lots of people are influenced in their purchasing decisions by moods or feelings. In fact traditional shops have been playing on it for years. From the very obvious Christmas decorations, to more subtle smells (there was a supermarket that apparently pumped artificial smells of things like strawberries in the summer to increase ... Read Full Story

This for me is the one thing that you can do to your website that will make most difference. There is increasing evidence that people dislike searching around huge websites with loads of pages when actually all they wanted to do was find a hotel and book a nice room, order breakfast, find something interesting to do locally, see what’s going on in the area and pay a reasonable price. Surely, in today’s world, we should be able to give them that…. you wouldn’t think so lookin... Read Full Story

It sounds fairly obvious, but when someone arrives on your website (perhaps from an ad word or click, which all costs you money!) the first thing that should happen is that they are able to immediately find the information that answers their question or is relevant to their reason for coming to visit you…. How are you supposed to do that?  You can’t read their minds, or understand their thought process, the best you can do is mirror their search engine terms, isn’t it?  Stil... Read Full Story

I read some interesting stats on a blog yesterday (I can’t remember which one, my apologies to the ‘blogger’ in question!) which actually, I suspect, most people already know. But at the risk of ’stating the obvious’ I thought this subject deserves a further airing. Here are the facts.  Conversion rates (look-to-book ratios) are the most important indicator of the effectiveness of a website, the higher the ratio, the better. With average conversion rates of only ... Read Full Story

Introduction - convert more visitors into customers and get them to spend more,  can it really be done?   The biggest challenge for tourism, leisure and hospitality websites isn’t much of a secret……… Hopefully you’re getting lots of visitors (if your SEO is doing its job) and your site is nice and ’sticky’ - I hate that phrase and what it usually stands for, but more on that later,  you’ve spent lots of money on design, layout and imagery as wel... Read Full Story