Web whys
A couple of weeks ago Forte Hotels signed a deal with Internet company Lastminute.com that gives the Web site's users access to the hundreds of Forte hotels around the world. This should be the first in a series of handshakes which aims to put the site at the top of the list for anyone looking to book a hotel room.
The use of the World Wide Web as an interactive marketing tool is increasing at the same staggering rate as access to the Internet is. A recent survey showed that in just the past 18 months the number of Caterer readers who use the Internet has doubled.
But only now is its genuine usefulness for the smallest hoteliers and restaurateurs becoming obvious. In last week's Caterer, for instance, Martin Cummings, proprietor of Arundel's 15-bedroom Amberley Castle hotel, said that 15% of his guests are now brought in by his inclusion on Internet listings. That compares with just 3% three years ago (Caterer, 18 November, page 14).
Such stories abound at the moment. The technology of the Internet and the simplicity of its use is racing forward so quickly that anyone saying they'll wait and see could already be missing out.
The Earl of Bradford opened Porters Bar in Covent Garden two months ago with no advertising other than setting up its Web site, www.porters-bar.com, and listing it on his own London Internet guides.
"We haven't promoted Porters Bar apart from on the Internet - no publicity, no advertising - and we're already doing over £10,000 a week," he proclaims. "And that's just scratching the surface. I hope it will do £20,000 a week eventually - all with just Internet promotion."
After his introduction to the Internet just two years ago when he was lent a laptop computer from the House of Lords, Bradford has become a complete convert. He now has sites for his Porters English Restaurant (www.porters.uk.com), his Porters Bar, several London and England restaurant guides and an on-line shopping site.
"I was absolutely convinced this was the way forward. I knew I had to have a site for Porters and I knew it had to be comprehensive - with menus, reviews, customer comments, all those things," he explains.
"So it went up, and we started to get a few bookings from it, but I soon realised that, though it's great to have a Web site, if only a few people see it then it doesn't really accomplish an awful lot."
And that's how the guides www.london-restaurants.com and www.english-restaurants.com were born. "Those were just ideas I put together to try and steer people to what I think are the fairly priced, non-tourist restaurants of London, the places were Londoners go," says Bradford.
These are free sites, which unsurprisingly feature several links to the Porters pages.
The success of a Web site is judged by the number of visits or number of "hits" each page receives. A visit is registered every time a user logs on to the site, a hit is clocked up every time that user clicks their mouse on one of the page's features. So one visit can lead to dozens of hits.
Each week london-restaurants.com receives 1,000 visits, english-restaurants.com 500. Together they get 78,000 individual visitors a year, of which 15,000 go and look at the Porters site while they are there. Bradford has now pulled all his advertising from tourist magazines and is concentrating everything on the Internet, making him a saving, he estimates, of £12,000.
"I just think there's so much potential for what you can do on the Internet," Bradford says. "If you look at where we've come in the last five years it's staggering. But the way technology is moving, the next five years will be even more staggering."
The number of visits to Bradford's Web sites is a good example of what a Web site can achieve, but inclusion in an Internet guide can be equally as effective. As Bradford says, what's the point of a Web site if no one knows it's there?
New breed
One new breed of Internet site is www.smoothhound.co.uk, designed to give operators who won't, or can't, commit to an actual Web site of their own, a place on the Internet. Started in 1995 - an age ago in Internet terms - SmoothHound is essentially a hotel guide on the Web. For £49 a year the company takes the hotelier's details and a simple Web page is made for them and added to the SmoothHound listings.
It is designed mainly for small establishments with just a handful of rooms. SmoothHound partner John Reed says the site now lists 8,500 hotels around the UK, and has more than 100,000 visits a week at its seasonal peak during the summer months.
"The feedback we get from hotels is simply that it's a very good form of advertising. Some have even said things like, ‘We're dropping Yellow Pages'," he says. "Basically, it's like having your own Internet page without all the hassle."
SmoothHound can produce many examples to back up their claims of success. For example, the Badminton Villa in Bath reports £25,000 worth of booking in just six months, and Worcestershire guesthouses the Driffold and Leasow House rely on the Internet for more than half their business.
Launched last month, www.laterooms. com works along a similar principle of giving hoteliers without their own site access to the Web. The difference being that, as implied by the domain name, Laterooms.com is being marketed as a way of shifting those empty rooms at the last minute.
"There is a massive amount of bedstock out there that at some time or other is not used," says sales director Chris Allen. "As a hotelier you're always concerned right up to the last second how your occupancy and yield is going to go, and if you don't fill that room you're losing money."
Of course, this problem has been around since hotels began, but Laterooms.com - for less than £10 a week per hotel - can constantly update a hotel's information, giving details of vacant rooms and any discounts available. Customers can simply search for a location and a budget and the available rooms come up.
After just a month, there are 2,000 people a day using the site, as well as an average of 20 new hotels joining the already 500-strong database. There is no actual room booking through Laterooms, but the hotel's phone details come up along with a link to its individual Web site if they have one.
"That's so you don't lose the intimacy between the customer and the hotel, which is crucial in this business," explains Allen. It is also because every hotel has a different reservations system and on-line booking would be practically impossible at this point.
It is not only the smaller hotels that could benefit from this "let us do the work for you" type of Internet marketing. There is also potential for the small take-away food outfit, as demonstrated by eMenu.co.uk. Again, this takes the details of a client and, for £25 a month, sets them up a simple Web page. A customer can then click into that Web page, choose what they want and an order will come through to the shop's fax machine.
"The people who have really seen the potential of this are sandwich shops. I think they see the possibility of big business from offices sending in large orders in one go," says director Simon Shute. The eMenu service was started in September last year and Shute says it has a database of between 25 and 30 businesses at the moment.
"Two years ago a Web site was simply a brochure, now it really wants to be an e-commerce site. The advertising benefit is there, but if you can make it interactive and get orders, then it will be at its most effective," believes Shute.
FACTS
The Earl of Bradford's sites
Hotel guides
Menu sites
Source: Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, 25 November - 1 December 1999.
