mylink Best practices This document shall help hotels and local offices to display a property on mylink in the most attractive and most user

friendly way with the goal to maximize booking revenue. Results from usability studies and proven industry best

practices for Internet booking engines have been summarized as a guideline for you.

Product version 5.0.02.01/11 mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J.Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

th May 2010

Document version number: 3.0

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

th May 2010

Document version number: 3.0

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Table of Content 1 Purpose of this document .................................................................................... 3

2 Enhance your descriptions ................................................................................... 3

3 Highlight where your property is located .............................................................. 4

4 Reduce the number of rate and room type combinations..................................... 4

5 Reduce amount of guarantee options to the booker ............................................ 5

6 Configure the max amount of adults, children, nights and rooms ........................ 6

7 Select the Look and Feel for your website ........................................................... 7

8 Customize Colours with selected design .............................................................. 8

9 Edit your Hotel Logo............................................................................................. 9

10 Exterior image and Picture gallery management ............................................... 10

11 Display add on packages ................................................................................... 11

12 Recommendations for Search engine optimization ............................................ 12

13 Make data driven decisions using mylink web analytics..................................... 14

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

th May 2010

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1 Purpose of this document This document is a guideline for hotels and partners on how to work with the Internet Booking engine mylink. It contains recommendations that were made after validating with consultants, usability tests and many years of industry experience. The goal is to maximize the effectiveness of your website.

2 Enhance your descriptions Room description Potential guests are very interested in understanding what the differences between the various room types and its amenities are. Myfidelio.net allows to configure a specific description of room types for the channel CD. We recommend you to use this feature and describe with more details what the room has to offer. It will make the process user friendly and the booking engine more competitive also. We recommend a maximum of 150 characters including spaces, distributed on 2 lines.

Rate description In order to help during the decision making process of the booker clearly state what is included in the rate. This could concern Breakfast, Dinner and Lunch, Service charges and taxes or package elements.

Location description Considering that potential guests are very interested in knowing what is offered around the hotel and activities nearby we recommend you to add this type of information to the hotel description as well. Mylink front end myfidelio.net

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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3 Highlight where your property is located Along with the location description which should state very useful information we have by default enabled all hotels with an Interface to Google maps, which automatically shows upon opening the little globe next to the address.

This map could as well be disabled via the mylink admin tool, which is needed in countries where streets cannot be displayed. Please click on the below link to see which countries those are: http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/mapcoverage_filtered.html

4 Reduce the number of rate and room type combinations Rate room combinations are the amount of options that you provide to your booker. It has been proven industry best practice, to only load a manageable amount of rate room combinations to the user. Too many options on the Internet booking engine will lead to bookers turn away from your website. Consultants recommend the choice not to exceed 6 rate room combinations (6 room types and 1 rate or 3 rooms and 2 rates). We are aware that due to configuration in a PMS the available rate room combinations may exceed this value. Therefore in our recommendation we do not suggest to exceed an amount of 12 rate room combinations on the mylink front end. Remember you do not necessarily need to distribute all room types to each channel, if you only have a physical inventory of 1 or 2 or if you have a very exclusive room such as a presidential suite.

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

th May 2010

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5 Reduce amount of guarantee options to the booker Guarantee options commonly in use for hotels are:

• GX- Guaranteed reservation The credit card provided will only be charged in case of no-show or late cancellation

• DX- Deposit to credit card Guaranteed reservation with Prepayment to credit card

• XX- Non guaranteed reservation No credit card details required. The room will be reserved until 6 pm local time on the day of arrival.

Within current mylink all guarantee options set up for a channel will display as available to the booker, regardless of what rate code has been chosen. In order to avoid any user error we strongly recommend to select only one guarantee option per hotel for mylink. This will eliminate the possibility that the user by error selects the wrong guarantee type or that he is confused by the choice he has. As a consequence this might lead to the fact that the rate strategy must be revised (e.g. in case an advanced purchase rate is used). The positive effect though will be that the booking process is more straightforward and user friendly.

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

th May 2010

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6 Configure the max amount of adults, children, nights and rooms

When a hotel supports a certain maximum occupancy in myfidelio.net for all rooms, this should be defined on the front end as well to avoid that the booker tries to book an occupancy that you do not support and receives an error when trying so. The same applies for maximum number of children, maximum number of nights and maximum number of rooms. Maximum occupancy in myfidelio.net

Configuration of maximum values in the mylink admin tool, be default set to 9/15 for maximum number of nights.

Display of maximum values on booking front end available to the booker.

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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7 Select the Look and Feel for your website

Please select a template that suits best to your corporate design. We offer at this stage 6 templates at a choice for you and will be adding more soon:

Templates available are blue, silver, red, orange, beige and green

If your hotel needs a specific colour, of course we can create a template designed specifically for you. There will be a customization cost involved. Please contact EAME-OPERA-Commerce@micros.com, who will be able to assist you.

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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8 Customize Colours with selected design After having selected you a template from the list you will be able to change the background colour, the font colour, the hyperlinks and the background colour of the price fields to fit the page well into the existing design. The navigation, buttons and calendar functionality is already predefined for you. We recommend to avoid using dark backgrounds. Especially the background should never be darker then the font, otherwise texts may be difficult to read. In case dark background with light font is required, the Price fields background should be amended to a dark colour, too. As mylink is added into the website as an I-frame or new window, you can manipulate the design to have a background that matches to the hotel website. But remember that the booking front-end has to stay very user friendly!

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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9 Edit your Hotel Logo It is very important that the logo is cut nicely and saved as a GIF file in a transparent background, so that it fits well into the template. It is very easy to manipulate a logo and transform it in any standard photo program. The size of the logo should not exceed 850 pixels width and will be resized when uploaded to the admin tool. If the logo is smaller it is placed to the left hand side of the page: Non transparent gif image transparent gif image

With a standard photo program such as Irfanview this can easily be done by saving a logo that is already in GIF or PNG as a GIF-file.

A second window will appear where you can define the transparent colour:

Define the colour to be transparent (in this case white shall become transparent)

To have the logo in form of a banner the width should be exactly 850 pixels. The height will be adjusted automatically.

In case you require assistance with creating a banner that is suitable for you, please kindly contact EAME-OPERA-Commerce@micros.com. This can be accommodated at little extra cost.

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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10 Exterior image and Picture gallery management

All pictures will be resized, but you need to be careful with the format of the pictures, so that the overall look & feel reflects harmony. Therefore we recommend that all pictures should be horizontal or vertical. However, if you need to mix horizontal and vertical pictures, we recommend that you make sure that each row has either only horizontal or vertical images. To mix them in the same row does not give a good impression on the look & feel. Usability tests made in cooperation with our e-commerce company FRY.com showed that potential guests are very interested in knowing what is offered around the hotel, activities nearby. Therefore please always when possible, we recommend that you add pictures of the location and of attractions nearby. The amount of images (including exterior) should ideally be 3, 6, 9 or 12 to fit well into the picture gallery. Vertical images Horizontal images

In case a hotel has both horizontal and vertical images, we suggest to arrange them in packages of 3 in each line using the drag and drop functionality available in the admin tool under Upload – Picture Gallery – View and Delete – Apply changes and do not forget to Save changes in the end of your update. Mixed vertical & horizontal Drag and Drop to change the order of images, then apply changes

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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11 Display add on packages

In order to highlight and promote additional packages to customers we suggest to position additional packages on top of the Rate information. This has been proven Best practice as a result of usability tests that were carried out.

This can easily be done in the admin tool under Layout for Customer Information, Review Reservation and Reservation Confirmation process.

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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12 Recommendations for Search engine optimization SEO on mylink is an additional option of allowing your hotel to be indexed by search engines. It does not replace any SEO that is already done for your website. Please also note that it can increase the likely hood of being found by search engines, but it is not a guarantee. An additional suggestion is to actively register your mylink URL on the respective search engine, which needs to be done in addition to the SEO setup for mylink. Registration of the mylink URL to Search engines: For Google http://www.google.com/addurl/ For Bing http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx The most important tag is the title tag. Information on this tag will be indexed by Google and other search engines and displayed in the search results. The title tag must be meaningful.

Example of a Title tag:

This is defined in the HTML code of the website: <title>Hotel Le Bailli de Suffren seaside Hotel Le Rayol Canadel - Saint Tropez - French Riviera - France</title>

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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The description tag should contain relevant information for the person searching for the website as search engines may display it below the Title in the search results.

Example of a Description tag

This is defined in the HTML code of the website: <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Sur la C&ocirc;te D'Azur, entre Saint Tropez et Le Lavandou, en bord de mer, l'h&ocirc;tel **** Le Bailli de Suffren propose 53 suites avec balcon vue frontale mer. Plage priv&eacute;e de sable fin, tennis en terre battue, piscine d'eau douce chauff&eacute;e. Restaurant gastronomique avec sp&eacute;cialit&eacute;s typiques de la Provence. R&eacute;sidence de Tourisme Les Isles de la Mer."> Robot tag: In order to allow search engines to index your booking engine, it is mandatory to set the robot tag to “Index, Follow”. Only in the case that you do not want to allow search engines to index your site you would set the robot tag to “Noindex Nofollow”.

mylink best practices Author: A. Bianchi, J. Knigge Department: myfidelio.net Date: 10

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13 Make data driven decisions using mylink web analytics mylink offers the opportunity to monitor you performance via the mylink admin tool using the following reports. Use those reports for benchmarking a hotel with other hotels that you consider competition (competitive set) or to measure your own performance over the time and particularly when you do any changes (like decreasing rates) to your booking engine.

One of the most effective tools to measure performance is the look to book ratio. What is a good look to book ratio? The look to book ratio provides you information on how many percent of the lookers (the persons performing an availability request) are actually booking a hotel. In general the look to book ratio depends on many different factors

- Type of hotel (resort or business), - Location - ADR (Average daily rate) - Type of keyword / the way how they found mylink

As an average out of 100 visitors that enter a website 35% check rates and from this value 3% make a purchase, which means approximately 1% conversion rate of overall traffic. For mylink that means that the average look to book rate would be 3 %, as the overall traffic on the website is not considered in the figures.

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