Increasing profitability in the hospitality industry is getting more challenging with each passing day. This is because of multiple factors ranging from increase in competition for niche markets to a rise in operating costs and other expenses.
Hotel online marketing is one area where businesses focus on selling their properties to their target audience. In simple terms businesses are employing every technique and method ranging from hotel search engine marketing to using multiple channels to increase business profits.
While hotels focus on all these aspect and other including safety and comfort of their guests at all times, a surprising fact is many of them fail in cyber securing their hotel websites. As per studies carried out on a thousand websites of hotels, it was surprisingly to find that just 11% of the hotels had secure websites. That left an incredible number of 89% with sites that lacked in security.
Having an unsecure website adversely impacts direct bookings
With cyber crime on the increase and even major hotel chains having their security breached, it is only common sense that guests not satisfied with a website’s security, will think twice before making a booking. Majority of guests state that they will not make any purchases if a connection is deemed unsecure. Hotel owners both large and small have to realise that website maintenance is something that needs to be prioritised, while focusing on ensuring it is secure against cyber crime. Those hotels that overlook this aspect run a very strong risk of losing their business to other competitors with secure websites.
Secure websites attract bookings
In fact, from 2017 Google even realised the significance of secure websites and started giving higher rankings to those websites that were secure. Security of a website is now considered to be an important ranking factor. Those hotel owners who have picked up on this have secured their websites and have benefitted with a rise in bookings. Google realises the value of trust and the demand for it from consumers. Henceforth, they have started to reward those businesses that offer high security on their websites.
As a result those hotels and businesses that have secure websites have a greater scope to generate bookings with online users, while contrastingly those that are lacking in security measures will stand less of a chance. If you have an online company that manages and administer your website and it is still not secure, you need to have them get it secured or shift your business to another vendor.
Websites that are not secure will perform poorly: With a rise in awareness for cyber security along with search engines, even Internet browsers have jumped on the bandwagon. Browsers like Firefox and Chrome have started to mark websites as ‘not secure’. This trend is also visible with other online browsers to ensure that we have a better secure web. Those websites that are secured have a green address bar, while those that are unsecure feature a red address bar. This factor attracts guests and those websites having green address bars are bound to attract higher traffic.