It’s only Halloween, but the holiday rush is coming up soon for travel businesses. People will start booking hotels if they haven’t already as they prepare to visit family. Dinner plans and reservations will start booking up as people for good eating.
And there are many more things that will all take place in a relatively short period of time. For your travel business and website, the time to prepare is right now so you can take advantage of the opportunities you have during this special time of year.
Here are a few tips for preparing your website for this holiday season.
Tip #1. Update All Website Content
My general rule of thumb is to look at website content every six months. I should probably change that to look at it every three months, but six months is good.
This is a good time for restaurants to check their menus and make sure everything is up-to-date. If you’re adding new items for holiday then update the menu.
For hotels and inns, check to make sure all the prices are up-to-date. Make sure descriptions are still accurate.
For all travel businesses, add in a touch of holiday to the content. You can tweak the image on the homepage to fit a holiday feel and setting. Give a little holiday welcome on the homepage to welcome people that will be visiting during this season.
Tip #2. Check All Forms And Functions
Go through each page on the site and make sure everything is loading correctly. Look for errors on pages or things that look out of place like unformatted text and incorrect images.
Also try the forms on your site like ordering forms or contact forms. Make sure they’re working and if not get in touch with your designer and developer to get things squared away.
You could also do a little test with a site like UserTesting.com. See if visitors are struggling with anything on the site and make tweaks to make it easier to use. You could also do this by asking a friend to try the site.
Tip #3. Create A Holiday Marketing Calendar
I’m guilty of planning to do things and then not having the time to do them. I need to create a plan or a calendar in order to make sure things get done.
For your holiday marketing you’ll want to create a calendar. It should have all the items on it that you want to publish and change over the next two-month period.
Add in plans for emailing. Add in plans for changing images on the site. You could even add in ideas for adding content to your Facebook and Pinterest accounts.
Tip #4. Begin Collecting Email Addresses
The holidays are a great time to start collecting email addresses if you haven’t already. You can collect in person when you interact with your visitors and you can start collecting them on your site.
A great service to start using is MailChimp. It’s inexpensive and the price only goes up as you add more subscribers. Setup an email form on your site. Your designer or developer can help with this. Add the form to the footer or in the header. If you have a blog add the signup after each post or in the sidebar.
Then when next year comes around you can start sending holiday emails, but for now you can use the influx of traffic to capture the addresses.
Tip #5. Give Someone Ownership Of The Website
Things can get lost in the shuffle on your website during this busy time of year. That’s why it’s good to give ownership of the site to somebody on your team. If it’s you, you’ll have to be honest with yourself if you think you’ll have the time to work on it.
If not, give someone else the tasks that are mentioned here. If it’s the first year of making holiday changes you can have loose requirements. Then after the season you can assess the performance and plan for changes next year.
Bonus Tip: Prepare For Mobile Next Year
One last thing to prepare for next year is to optimize your site for mobile. Travel sites are especially prone to getting visitors that use smartphones to visit websites.
It would be pushing it to make changes to your site right now, but for next year work with your designer to get a responsive site ready so you can give mobile visitors a great experience when they visit your site.
Conclusion
There will be a lot going on this holiday season. It’s going to be a great time for your business, but you want to make sure your website is ready for all the opportunity. Follow the tips above and you’ll put yourself and the site in a good place just as the holiday season swings into high gear.
Happy Holidays!
Image: Justin Russell
