Hospitality Websites Look Great and Say Almost Nothing

Twenty past three, your restaurant is empty after the lunch rush, and you’re at the two-top by the window with a coffee going cold beside your elbow.

Tomorrow’s produce order is half typed on your phone. The reviews tab is open behind it, the way it’s been open behind everything for years.

You pull down to refresh it. Same number as this morning.

I’ve sat across the table while owners did that a dozen times. Not one of them has ever opened their own website in the same breath.

So I went and pulled the numbers on the trade instead. I sampled 3,350 hospitality businesses across 24 cities, then audited 1,542 of their websites.

Restaurants and hotels take more care over their photos than over any other part of the page, and I’ll hand them that gladly. They even write the little text box under the upload, which decides whose private room turns up when a woman goes hunting through the image results.

Almost everything else that turns a stranger into a booking is missing.

Which of those two halves did you last spend real money on?

The number you watch

89.0% of the hospitality businesses I counted hold at least one Google review, and the average one is carrying 1,323 of them.

Your guests are never short of an opinion. They don’t wait to be asked for one, either.

The rating is what stings, at 3.9 stars, the lowest average of the 47 trades in the report.

I’ve been sitting with that for weeks. My best guess runs like this, and you’re welcome to tell me I’ve got it backwards.

A photo is a promise.

Sunset on the patio, a plate that a stylist fussed over for an hour before anyone photographed it, and a bed made tighter than any bed you have ever made in your life.

Then a guest turns up on a wet Tuesday in November. The patio’s shut, the food’s good, the room’s clean, and clean is a four at best.

Nobody ever left you one star over a website. But an expensive photo raises the bar the night has to clear, and this trade raises it higher than anyone else on the street.

Would your photos survive an ordinary Tuesday? Be honest with me.

A repair shop in Indianapolis started climbing again the week it began texting the price before anyone touched the car. Same work, same prices, a promise the customer could hold him to.

The rating is also the only thing on that phone you cannot edit directly. Everything else I’m about to describe is entirely under your control, which is either encouraging or annoying depending on your afternoon.

You can still nudge it, and asking a happy guest on their way out is the cheapest lever in the building.

Almost nobody writes a word

Only 17.5% of hospitality sites publish a blog, against 37% nationally, which puts this trade 45th of 47.

It drives me up the wall, because you’re sitting on better material than any other business on the block.

What’s happening this weekend, where a visitor should park, who grows your tomatoes, and which of your rooms gets the morning sunlight.

What a visitor should do with the three hours between check-in and dinner, and what the kitchen will cook for a kid who eats nothing but noodles.

Every one of those is something a stranger types into a phone while standing on a sidewalk in your neighborhood, deciding where the evening goes.

So when a family from two provinces over goes looking for parking near your street on a Friday afternoon, whose page do they land on?

Not yours, and not because Google has anything against your restaurant. Nobody ever wrote that particular page.

Your homepage says “Welcome to our restaurant, where we use fresh local ingredients” instead, which is the sentence every restaurant on earth already has sitting on theirs.

How many searches like that ran in your town last month, do you reckon?

Ten homepages in a hundred take a message

Nationally, 28% of homepages take a message, and inside this trade that falls to 10.2%.

Plenty of your bookings run through a table app or a travel site on someone else’s domain. My robot lands on the homepage, finds no form, and marks you down while a perfectly good booking funnel hums away one click later.

A booking widget only ever answers the easy question, though. What about everyone else?

The wedding party, the office lunch order, the travel writer on deadline, and the father whose daughter has a peanut allergy and needs a human being to say yes in writing before he’ll risk a Saturday evening on you.

None of those people are filling in a table-for-two dropdown. They either find somewhere to type or they take their money down the road.

Where do they type on your site?

The two you already got right

I’d hate to leave you thinking this is a careless trade, because the numbers say otherwise in a couple of spots.

A client of mine went two years without a meta description. Her search result opened with a line scraped off her cookie banner, because nobody had ever typed the sentence Google prints under your name when you give it one.

She’d read that result a hundred times over and assumed it was weather, when it was really a text box nobody had ever shown her.

Your trade mostly fills that box in. 86.5% of hospitality pages carry one, which sits comfortably above the 77.9% national line.

71.8% link out to a social profile too, ahead of the 66% I get across every trade.

So the underlying wiring is in decent condition, and the missing ingredient is the sentences nobody ever wrote.

Want to see the other end of it? I keep a page of hospitality sites I think get this right, where the photos and the words were held to the same standard by the same person.

Who this wasn’t written for

If you’re full every night on regulars and a phone that never stops, none of this was aimed at you. Carry on, and give the chef my regards.

If your rooms fill on a travel site’s traffic and you’ve made peace with the cut they take, same answer. Keep the photographer.

And if you’ve got a page for the parking, a page for the weekend, and somewhere on the homepage for a stranger to type a question, you were already doing the work. You just wanted to know whether anyone else was. Now you do.

I wrote this for the owner who watches that rating like weather and has never once read the page with their name across the top of it. Is that you, or have I got the wrong table?

Restaurants and hotels are one of the trades I build for, and I’d still start with the parking sentence rather than the photos. That one is free, and it takes five minutes.