Are your hotel's website visitors able to find the content they are looking for to make a booking? If your users have a difficult experience finding the information and content on your website - your issue possibly starts with your information architecture. An information architecture, or IA, is the structural design of a website's content. The purpose of your hotel's website IA is to categorize the content into a coherent structure that the intended audience can understand and quickly browse.

Consider these two facts:

• The average attention span of an adult online is only 8 seconds.
• The largest percentage of leisure travelers starts their travel research with brand sites and apps when searching for accommodations (Google).

The combination of these two facts means your hotel's website must have the information architecture in a structure that's easy to understand for a traveler to navigate within a very short amount of time or else you risk abandonment.

Based on our extensive experience, the hotel websites we design at Sabre Hospitality Solutions are built with best in class information architectures that are targeted specifically to each property and the hotel's website visitors. Multiple factors are evaluated to create the best informational architectures in hospitality. When designing your hotel's IA make sure you address the basics:

• The strategic business goals of the property
• The market segments of the property
• Past Google Analytics or web analytics data
• Revenue generating content for the property and trends within the industry
• "Money Spots" which are the highest revenue generating content in relation to the placement
• Current and future website content
• Logical and easy to comprehend IA structures

A critical aspect to consider when creating a website IA is not to overload the user with too many choices within each section. In fact, we recommend no more than 8 items in any section in order to allow users to quickly scan through their choices.

Have you analyzed if your hotel's website visitors are able to understand your content structure to find the information to plan their travel? Have you seen a large number of bounce rates or shop abandonment from your website analytics? Here is an example of an easy to navigate Information Architecture: The Umstead Hotel and Spa. If your IA is not easy to navigate, you could be missing out on an opportunity to convert your website visitors into customers.

Discover how our SynXis InstaSite solution can provide you a powerful, hospitality-centric website with your IA in mind.

Want to test if your hotel's website IA is easy to navigate and optimized to convert lookers to bookers? Contact me and we'll conduct an analysis.

To find out more about IA or SynXis InstaSite, current customers may contact their Account Manager. New customers, go here for additional information.