4 Powerful Reasons to Translate your Hotel Website
If you are in the hotel industry, you may have noticed that the competition grows fiercer every year. Hoteliers usually have to face off seasons and keep up with new marketing strategies to face the increased competition from other accommodation providers.
Attracting new customers to your facilities must be a never-ceasing uphill battle. That’s why today we want to talk to you about the advantages of translating your hotel website.
But, let’s take it one step at a time. Let me put a few facts out there.
Did you know that 57% of all reservations within the travel and tourism industry are made online? Pretty amazing, right?
Also, did you know that 47% of the web users are non English speakers?
If these numbers are not saying much yet, here’s the last fact. According to CSA Research, 75% of the consumers will only buy in their own language.
That means you are wasting great opportunities of attracting foreign visitors to your hotel if you do not have your website available in more than one language.
By presenting your site content in languages your future guests can understand, you’ll be more likely to stand out and land those international bookings.
The Chinese market is a fine example. Chinese residents are currently the world’s most powerful outbound market. Only in 2018, they took 149.7m overseas trips. Now, if you consider less than 10% of Chinese population speaks English, you must realize it’s a huge market you could be missing out.
On the graph above we can see that 5 out of the 9 countries that spend the most on international tourism are non English speakers.
I bet translating your website doesn’t sound that crazy now. It just makes sense if you are targeting potential customers in non English-speaking countries.
Today I want to present you with 4 major reasons to translate your site, show you the nice work some hotels are already doing and offer you a fast and simple website translation solution.
4 major reasons to have a multilingual hotel website
Still reluctant? Let’s see those four reasons in detail, starting with the value of your global customers.
1. International guests will boost your business
As a hotelier, you probably have already determined which are your high and low seasons for domestic clientes. As you know, low seasons may be long and gloomy periods in which you’ll have very few guests. Reaching out to the international market is a surefire solution to minimize this issue.
Every country has outlined work periods and holiday periods. That’s what you’ll want to use to boost your hotel activity.
For example, Chinese tourists usually travel abroad around their National Day on October 1st. Now, this is typically a low tourism period within European countries.
There is your first reason. Translating your website means that you will reach out to a wider customer pool and you maybe what you offer will encourage more and more international customers to stay at your hotel. That’s a great solution for your profits not to drop around domestic tourism off season and avoid dry spells.
2. You’ll be among the top competitors on the hospitality industry
As we mentioned before, the tourism and hotel industry is growing fiercer at an extortionate rate, which is pretty logical in an industry worth $7.6 trillion.
You may be tempted to think you can get away without translating your website. After all, 20% of the world population speaks English, right? Also, we can’t deny it’s the most prevalent language you find online.
However, there’s a small detail you’re missing. Most of the people who speak English have learned it as a second language.
There’s more. 9 out of 10 website users claimed they preferred to browse websites in their own language if possible.
Not only that, but 42% of ecommerce customers won’t purchase services or products from a “monolingual” website.
Just do the math. If your website is not translated, you may be losing a significant amount of sales. People running searches for a hotel will probably pass over your site just because it’s only available in English.
Even if they do enter your web and take the time to try and understand your copy, they are less likely to make a reservation since they might find the booking process too complicated.
Stats also show that potential customers from non-English speaking countries prefer to pay higher rates at hotels that have their website content available in in their native language.
Ultimately, having a monolingual website will do nothing but make you fall behind in the race against other hotels that have their content translated.
3. Translation may bring along SEO benefits
As we mentioned before, about 57% of hotel bookings are made online each year.
Taking into account such numbers, your website visibility is vital to attract more customers to your hotel. Now, the best way to achieve good visibility is making sure your site appears in search engine results when potential customers are looking for a place to stay.
Translating your website can boost your SEO in a few different ways. Let’s see a couple examples.
In the first place, targeting keywords in different languages can help improve your rankings.
Researching keywords in the most popular languages among the audience you are targeting will help you improve your appearance results for non-English searches.
Another way of positively influencing your SEO is creating separate pages for content in different languages. This way Google can crawl and index your site accurately for higher placement on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Having separate pages for the content in each one of the languages you’re targeting is much better than piling up content in several languages on the same page- which, by the way, is often penalized by Google search bots.
For this strategy to pay off, you will need to take serious care of SEO best practices on your site. This includes optimizing for search after translating your content, not before.
Multilingual SEO may be a little tricky, but using ConveyThis to translate your site is a good way to start as ConveyThis will automatically take care of some of those complicated aspects.
4. Localization can increase conversions
People on the translation industry know there is a clear difference between translating your website and localizing your website. Along with translation, localization is a key strategy that takes things to the next level and considers the cultural background and preferences of your guests in order to deliver the best site experience for them.
87% of the travelers looking for a place to stay are more likely to book a room in a website that offers them a personalized experience. For international customers, this experience must include localization.
You’re probably wondering which that remarkable difference between translation and localization is. Well, translation only takes care of your content. Localization will include anything from changing images, changing the way the text is displayed- for example, Arabic is written backwards – or simply having a language switcher with the language name, not just the country flag. Localization takes care of any detail that helps making the website appropriate for different target markets.
When you choose a tool to translate your site, you need to make sure it will prime your content for localization. ConveyThis does exactly that with every step of the conversion process, from the landing page to the confirmation email in your future customers’ language.
5 hotels that are on the right track
Statistics and numbers may give you cold, logical reasons to translate your website, but nothing will make your heart beat excitedly about the idea as the example of other successful multilingual hotel sites in action.
Check out Hotel de France Vannes:
Their site content is available in both English and French. They also have a clear target customer and they offer catering for business travelers: an overnight package with a meal service included.
On the other hand, the Italian hotel Miramonti is the most appealing choice for those tourists visiting the Alps:
Their website is available in seven different European languages, which ensures their target customer base gets a tailored experience. They also have their blog translated to all the seven languages in order to provide information to potential visitors and help improve their SEO.
The Thai beach resort KohKoon also knows how to attract their visitors from Europe and Asia:
They have their site translated to six languages, including Korean, French and German. Let’s also give them top marks for having a very helpful currency switcher that probably gets them lots of 5 star reviews when it comes to customer care.
Le Taos is a hotel and mountain apartment residence that offers more than just lodging. They offer private ski lockers, equipment rentals and lessons:
Their website is available in five languages- including Hebrew –to make sure all long-term, short-term and potential visitors get all the information they need in order to have an enjoyable trip.
Finally, we have the Acorn Hotel in Glasgow. Like the Miramonti, they not only translated their site, but also their blog in order to share useful information with the maximum number of customers possible:
Investing some time and effort to translate your hotel website tells your guests that you’re really committed to offering them the best experience. It demonstrates your professionalism level and will definitely drive more international customers to your doors.
Rely on ConveyThis to translate your website
There are so many reasons why translating your hotel website is a winning marketing strategy. But I’m here not to just point out the issues, but to provide a solution.
ConveyThis can translate and display your website in as many languages as needed.
What’s so great about ConveyThis? Your hotel website could be multilingual in just a few minutes without the need of having developers, code or duplicated sites. The best part? It’s compatible with all website technologies, such as WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, etc.
Then, what are you waiting for?
Hopefully, this article made you see how vital is to translate your site and have it available in more than one language. Failing to do so could lead you to miss out thousands and thousands of potential customers.
Guests who don’t speak the language your site is originally built in will probably overlook your hotel and search for another lodging that provides them with information in their own language. Also, without translating your website you’d be missing all of the SEO benefits that conveys.
But now you know better because you’ve already seen how much the translation of your site can add to your sales and localization.
Nevertheless, let’s recap once again on those four powerful reasons to consider translating your hotel website:
- International guests boost your business
- You can attract new customers from around the world
- Translation brings along SEO benefits
- Localization can increase conversions
