The Hotel Marketing Weblog

Not long ago the conventional wisdom in this industry was that English was something of an internet lingua franca. The consensus was that, overall, internet users were a technologically and culturally developed target. Whether or not they lived in an English-speaking country, they understood English.

This is why an English language website has long been considered a must-have for getting to the vast majority of potential clients. But if you have not yet taken in how much of a sea-change has come about, you should know that non-English speaking internet users have overtaken English speakers by a handsome margin. And month by month, it’s the non-English speaking group that’s growing fastest.

It’s hard not to notice this sort of change. USA Today’s website recently highlighted how a majority of travel sites are in a race to launch their own multilingual platforms. When I saw that the Ritz-Carlton chain had recently introduced Chinese and Japanese versions of its website, and that the Mariott was also bringing in Chinese and Spanish, I couldn’t help smiling.

My own hotel’s website has had six language editions for the last five years, at least. Not that I have the gift of second sight. It’s that, more prosaically, I manage a boutique hotel on the Elba Island, just off the coast of Tuscany. The Italian tourist season lasts fewer than two months a year, which is why, as a Elba hotel manager, I always felt that the best way to stretch that season out was to concentrate on international targets. Once this decision was made, a hotel website that spoke my clients’ own language (German, French, Dutch etc.) was the next logical step.

I don’t mind admitting that managing a multilingual website is no picnic. I didn’t just have the site’s static pages translated. Web localisation affected the scripts which manage my room availability control system, the booking collection system and, not least, the system for online deposit payments. Every time a procedure needed changing, that same change had to be made all over again for every single language - something that took a lot of time and money.

Add to this the fact that, if a visitor finds a site in his or her own language s/he assumes s/he can write emails to the hotel in that language too. So if the site is in six languages (which mine is) I should expect, and be ready for, emails in all of them. Either that or allow emails to our staff in just one language.

The quality of the translations is another aspect that shouldn’t be underestimated. There are dozens of web localisation sites on the internet, but many of them often do a pretty hit or miss job. Worse, none of your staff may know the language your website has been translated into, so you might never find out that the translation has macroscopic, possibly embarrassing mistakes.

Personal experience leads me to believe that a lot of mistakes could be avoided by just adapting the language, rather than by using a straight translation. This is why, on occasion, an expert copywriter can guarantee better results than a regular translator. The translator’s professionalism aside, what makes a biggest difference is the extent to which s/he really knows the subject matter. This is even more important than whether or not the translator is writing in his or her mother tongue.

Another ploy that can work is using second level national domain names (.co.uk for Britain; .de for Germany; .fr for France and .it for Italy). Registering these domain names is important: it makes it easier to get a hotel accepted by directories that only accept domestic sites. And when potential clients use a national search engine (rather than their local version of Google), it also gives your site a measure of positioning advantage.

If your firm has registered offices in an EU member state, registering these domains is not really an issue. If it doesn’t, you may need a local contact to register properly. (You should know that if this is a problem, specialist domain registration firms exist to help you find a solution without spending an arm and a leg.)

Though decidedly harder to manage, a multilingual site has a distinct competitive edge. Don’t let your competition keep all that edge to themselves. Consider how current changes in the global economy and the “low cost” flight revolution are having a profound effect on tourist numbers - opening up new markets for shrewd operators. That’s why my site will soon be in eight languages. Sayonara.

Tags: Foreign Markets, Marketing, Multilingual, Non-english markets, Site Localization, Site Translation

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Enghlish Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.