What a hotel website should be

SA Hotel Trat, Thailand

Online services for those who are travelling tend to be all about the supplier, or middle man, and not really for the person who will actually use the service.

For 8 months now my family and I have been travelling from the UK back across the world to New Zealand. Every few days we have been looking for a new hotel. And the hotel sites , and the cheap room sites all have their flaws. So when we found the website for the SA Hotel in Trat Thailand we exclaimed loud and long how good it was.

http://www.sahotel.in.th/

I'll warn you now it isn't pretty - but if like us you've looked at a lot of pretty hotel websites and still not really been able to make up your mind if it is the right place to stay I feel for you.

The best online presences for hotels are invariably those run by people who own and live at their own properties, and who are doing something different. A case in point is Les Manguiers http://www.mangokampot.com/ which again isn't pretty but gives you a real feel that you're going to be looked after

The really wonderful thing about the SA Hotel in Trat Thailand's site is that in one page it answers all the questions that their guests ask them everyday:

Is there an ATM/Supermarket/Restaurant/Night market nearby ?
Is it quiet ?
What are the rooms like ?
How much is a room ?

Most importantly it tells you what it is trying to be and what it is in the first paragraph :

a basic, yet complete & clean room to spend the night in relative comfort

Even better it tells you how much it is right there on the first page - no digging around hoping to stumble across the price. No having to go through a third party website.

Simple
Clean
Practicable
Useful

I hope they have a ton of business - their website fairly screams customer focus, it wish more were like it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

To setup rails on IIS and enable it for multiple Applications. START Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 IIS 6 RUBY Install ruby 185_22_rc2.exe You don't have to put it in c:\ruby I created the following folder c:\webdata\ruby, then ran the install. Run install into c:\webdata and say "YES" to deleting the existing ruby directory. During the install I ticked SciTE and Enable RubyGems Took 10mins 1000s of files Ruby GEMS Install Ruby Gems 0.9.1 (don't change it from the defaults) Extract zip file to temp directory, then double click setup.rb, does the default install (about 5mins) Then run at the command line gem pristine --all c:\> gem pristine --all I tried to install Ruby Gems in a particular directory, but couldn't get it working because if you use the command line SET command to put a value into GEM_HOME when the ruby gems installer setup.rb reads the registry it doesn't account for the fact that values in the registry contain double b...

Yammer and puddles

Recently I was asked " What are the top 10 points you think are important to get across to staff at all levels in an organisation about Yammer? " My initial reaction was "Tough ask", mainly because I've seen great write ups on what organisations get out of Yammer but very few that talk directly to the user benefits. Many articles give the usual cop out "users can't see the point, until they get it" I admit I was in that boat when I started using Twitter, a public micro blogging platform. But just like they said "once I used it I got it". What they didn't say was that it took a while and it suits certain people better than others. So as with all things in the social media space, be aware that culture change not the technology may be your biggest challenge. So what does Yammer, a microblogging platform for organisational use , do for real employees that is compelling enough for them to spend the time to "Get it" ? First off Y...

Role Title on profiles

Today one of the people I follow on Twitter asked the following question. @ChristySeason Asking all #intranet tweeps: Does your company publish employees' titles on your employee directory/look up/phone book? In following Intranets Live I've been lucky enough to see some great intranets. As such I was able to reply to Christy with the following Nokia do Deloitte do (see the end of the post) Christy's question also prompted me to document my own intranet's profile page. The following image is from the view other's get of my profile. When I look at my profile I see every item that is recorded. I'll save you from that, another post perhaps, if you're interested. DorjeM PS a couple of Vendors I've been reminded of, thanks Crhis and Carolyn, also have screen shots of their profile pages on the web: ThoughtFarmer - intranet software - slideshow of screen shots and Intranet connections - software solution