Common Anxieties of Switching to a New Website

People are naturally apprehensive to change and for some hoteliers, the idea of switching to a new web host may sometime be met with reluctance.  However, one thing that’s crucial to remember is that sticking with an old website can often mean losing out on better products, better deals, a better experience with prospective guests and ultimately the opportunity to turn prospective guests into confirmed reservations.  It has been proven time and time again that many hotel owners are paying double, triple and even much more for their current website when they could actually be paying significantly less for a superior product.  The problem is that they dread the idea of switching to a new process for a number of reasons but this dread may reflect a lack of understanding of just how manageable and much more beneficial it can be switching web hosts.  Hotels should never have to settle for mediocre performing sites with incompetent and slow-responding tech support.  It is definitely possible to switch to a better more cost-effective website that will delight prospective guests and increase ROI with little difficulty.

Losing content from old the website

Hotels might fear losing content from the old site during the transition but everything is capable of being saved onto the desktop.  If you created your own website with a site builder like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, it is likely you already have files of all of your content save to the desktop.  However, if you used a web-based builder, you can download each page and save them onto your computer.  This can be done either with an FTP tool or by the File>Save method with a web browser.   After all the pages have been saved, you can save all e-mails from the old site, if you have been using web-based mail, by forwarding e-mails to an off-network e-mail address of by archiving the e-mails to the computer hard drive.

During the process of saving all the content from the website on the computer and transferring it over to the new site, some might be concerned about downtime.  When switching to a new provider, you do not immediately have to let go of your old website.  You can still keep your old site while you switch over so long as you pay for the service which would leave no downtime at all.  Also, having all the information from the old site and saved and organized onto the computer will greatly speed the process of transitioning.

Ending longstanding relationship with designer

Many hotels fear cutting ties with designers and developers that they have grown to rely on for a long time but what they need to realize is hanging on to these vendors may not be in their best interest.  Relying on multiple vendors to manage a website inherently involves higher costs and delays while waiting for requests to be responded to.  Also, hotels might not have the confidence that they will be able to create a site that is equally beautiful if they decide to explore other options but with a specialized, fully-integrated system like the buuteeq DMS (Digital Marketing System), all the technical and design aspects are already taken care of.  Hotels just need to upload photographs and content which can mostly be taken from the previous site.  Not only will the buuteeq DMS deliver a site that is beautiful, better-performing, and fully branded with your hotels logo and color scheme, but since the system is completely self-managed, hotel have complete control and never have to deal with delays that come with relying on designers.