August 1, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Shaun Johnston
Publisher of NYC Getaways and "Quickway."
723 Springtown Road, Tillson, NY 12486
(845) 658-8270

17-room mountain lodge weighs
impact of Web

OLIVEREA, NY: Shangri-La at Mountain Gate is a lodge set high in the Catskill Mountains in Olivera, 35 miles west of Kingston just south of Route 28. Shangri-La’s 17 rooms have highest occupancy in the winter when skiers flock to Belleayre Mountain just 8 miles away. Specialties of Shangri-La are fine Indian cooking and ayurveda spa treatments.

Last November, NYC Getaways redesigned and began hosting the Shangri-La web site. This gave us access to the site’s traffic logs. Shangri-La has agreed to let us discuss their latest traffic figures.

In June, Shangri-La’s site got around 1100 visitors. Amost half of those came from the NYC Getaways sites and the two top search engines, Google and Yahoo, at around 170 visits each. It helped that NYC Getaways had got Shangri-La into number one position in both Google and Yahoo for “catskills resort.” (NYC Getaway's own site “getawaythecatskills.com” we got into position number 3.) The next 171 visits came from three other private regional guides. Another 26 came from their county tourism site. The rest came mainly from minor search engines and India-related organizations.

How many reservations did visitors from each of these sites make? “We can’t tell,” said Asha Bhavsar, who with her husband Bipin owns and manages Shangri-La. “Most people clearly don’t like being pressed to say where they found out about us. We know some come from NYC Getaways. Most that we know of come from the Belleayre Mountain ski lodging-bureau site.”

Not knowing how many reservations their own website brings them, Asha can’t tell how much each reservations costs them in terms of website expenses. She feels having a website is important, though, since it does bring some reservations, and it’s a good way to post information about specials.

How many reservations can a mountain lodge expect from over 1000 web-site visits? From data supplied by local lodgings, adding together reservations coming both online and by phone, individually-owned regional hotels get on average one reservation for every 20 website visits, a ratio that for lodges and inns probably climbs to one in 30. At a ratio of one in 30, in June Shangri-La’s site should have generated around 35 reservations, half their total inventory of rooms.

The latest issue of Hospitality Upgrade reports on experience at the national chain-hotel level, which is probably a fair guide to best practices. One article says that, on average, sites of national chain hotels with online booking get one online reservation for every 13 web-site visits. But, surprisingly, enquiries by phone bring these same chain hotels one reservation per two and a half calls!

Does that mean you get more reservations by answering the phone than by having a web site? No, says the author. What that means is people are doing their research online. By the time they make the phone call, they’ve already decided where they’re going to stay. Since most people like to make their reservations by phone, it’s still essential to have someone taking those calls. But the decision of where to stay is being made online.

If this is so, then online is where lodgings will increasingly have to market themselves. Marketing online will probably include tracking reservations back to their sources, analyzing web logs for source information, calculating rates of conversion of web visits to reservations, advertising in sites giving high conversion rates, and calculating rates of return on these costs.
Lodgings that do trace reservations back to online sources tell us 15-30% of their business is coming from the Web. One reports “most,” another “all.” The tipping point, around 40%, where widespread adoption of a new medium suddenly takes over, seems to be approaching, and could sweep over NYC’s getaway resort regions early next year.

In preparation, NYC Getaways has been working with Shangri-La on an online premium incentive tied to a voucher-and-binder recording system. The voucher is presented to guests at check-in and “cashed-in” for a discount on the selected premium at checkout. Voucher stubs are archived in the binder by month, making tracking easier.

By next year inexpensive and easy-to-use online reservation systems will probably allow some Web activity to be captured online. Within a few years, Asha estimates, most of her guests will be making their reservations online, provided websites like hers can offer visitors the appropriate services. “I think success will depend on good design, user-friendly forms, and good follow-up.”

NYC Getaways may help Shangri-La set up such a system. But we don’t plan to offer online booking as a service to lodgings ourselves. Experience doing so last year convinced us that reservations should be handled by lodgings, not by intermediaries coming between lodging and customer. (Additional information about the relationship between lodgings and intermediaries can be found online at www.hsmaihudsonvalley.org/News/
news.html.)

END

Asha and Bipin Bhavsar can be reached at (845) 254-6000. Shangri-La's URL is http://www.mountaingatelodge.com.