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2020Surviving Until the Market Returns – According to Booking.com, Airbnb, Innkeeper Recommends This to Get Bargain Photos
It Takes 15 Photos to Get These Travelers to Book
If you are gong after younger travelers Booking.com says they look at a minimum of 15 photos before they book.
The photo above is from Run of the River in Leavenworth, WA. It was taken by Kate Spencer Photography, innkeeper Jan Bollinger’s daughter-in-law. Not many of us have a resource like that!
But Jan had some thoughts on how you can get great shots like this for much, much less than if you hired a specialist.
Tips to Saving Thousands of Dollars While Getting Fabulous Photos
- Hire a wedding photographer’s “Second”. That’s an assistant to a wedding photographer – sometimes they are even better than the wedding photographer they work for! (That would definitely have been what my dad needed the day he photographed a friend’s entire wedding with the lens cap on.) Seconds often have the high skills and even more motivation because they are building their portfolio.
- Find a local real estate photographer. The cost can be $400 for a day’s work – they’ll have the lighting and the-know how to balance the inside and the outside-the-window light.
- Look for free shots to fill in – We can often find free shots for you on sites such as Pexels.com or from your tourism bureau.
I need to add photos to my website
Vaccine News Is Firing Up the Pent-Up Demand for Travel
Travel Weekly reported travel agents saying: “Within an hour of Pfizer announcing their vaccine, we started getting calls,” said Helen Papa, owner of TBH Travel in Dix Hills, N.Y. “Within an hour. It was amazing.”
“I don’t think it will surprise anybody that when the news is scary, people tend to go back into their cocoons,” Fain said. “As the news gets to be more positive they come out.:
What’s encouraging is how quickly the response happens. More
Americans Eager to Travel in 2021 — Today Hotel Marketing reports that 51% plan to travel for a vacation or business trip next year, – this according to new YouGov data. Even better – 59% of 30-44 year-olds are ready to make travel plans.
This is a great reason to tap into activities that appeal to that age group as well as firing up your newsletters and social media.
How To Avoid Death By Website
Some sites don’t get traffic because they aren’t configured properly. Such as not correctly setting up the “robots.txt” command. This can tell Google to ignore your whole site (the “disallow” command). Go to Google Search Console, paste the page URL in, and click on URL Inspection to see if your site is being indexed.
Here are 5 other basics that are sometimes missed.
- If a page is not included in Google Search Results, make sure that page is included in your sitemap.
- Include links to other pages within your site.
- Include links to content on external high-quality sites.
- Find any pages with a meta name that includes “noindex”—this (obviously) tells Google to ignore the page. Almost worse is when meta names don’t include your location
- Make sure your site has been properly designed for ADA compliance.
Honestly, last week I ran across 2 beautiful inn website and they were both missing most of the above.
Consider getting an audit just to make sure everything is right.
Photo as seen on the Run of the River website.
In Case You Missed It
Micro Weddings Bring in $37,500 in 3 Days Every Quarter
This Tiny Wedding story by Fodor’s starts with a farm that does several weddings a day. Couples only pay $2,500. They enjoy economies of scale such as flowers and having lighting pre set. (The real proof of a fine wedding?? – the PHOTO to prove it.) And best of all, people book the weddings on line.
15 Weddings in 3 Days Each Season – So basically once every Winter, Spring, Summer & Fall, 3 days are set apart for weddings.
“Cornman Farms hosts up to 15 micro weddings for a maximum of 10 guests, which includes the ceremony, venue rental, sparkling wine toast, bouquet, photography, and wedding cake for less than $2,500.” More ideas here.
If you need a fast wedding page or a Covid or other page, email Diane@iLoveInns.com
I need a new page on my website
Inn Offers Biggest Gift Certificate Deal We’ve Seen
Gift certificates: Pay $300 for a $450 value. We’ve been reading literally hundreds of gift certificate offers over the past few weeks. This one really caught our attention.
“When you’re ready to travel again, we’ll be here. And it’s never too early to start making plans. For what’s left of 2020 (or until we run out) we’re offering a $450 gift certificate package that includes $350 to spend at our inn and $100 to spend at restaurants and boutiques throughout the valley.
The cost of the package is $300.
Painless Website Fixing & Building
You know you need a few fixes to keep your website up-to-date. And you know it takes another part of your brain to do it yourself. And you’re just trying to keep things going, much less fix a website.
That’s what they have website developers for.
But often website designers only know the design part.
Some website designers don’t know about the back end of a website, the programming side of website fixing or building.
That part is where Google puts their robots to determine where your page position should be.
Work with I Love Inns and you’ll find it can sometimes even be fun — at least that’s what innkeepers tell us.
What We Heard
“I cant believe how efficient you are!!” – after we quickly delivered some important additions to an inn’s website.
Happy Association Leader – “Your presentation (to our inn association) was excellent… I am very pleased with the attention that you are able to give the individual inns. We’ve been able to move along because of the excellent directive.”
Delighted – “Susan and I are delighted with the work you have done for us this year and would like to continue with you next year!” Maine Innkeeper
So Pleasant! – “This whole experience has been so positive and so different from my last website-building experience with ___. It has been so pleasant.” Dorothy, owner, Valley Springs Farm
Thank You So Much Diane! “Were your ears ringing? I have been raving about working with you on my new website to my friend just now !” Judy Welch
Much Better Website Building Experience – “Our experience with you is head and heels above xxxxx.”
Amazing – “By the way, the iLoveInns web team is amazing to work with!
Get your 2020 tax savings by booking your new website today.