What today's tourist expects:
from your website

Ten years ago, a website with a few photographs and a phone number on it was perfectly fine.

And I am not being smart when I say that. It is simply true. If you had a website at all back then, you were ahead of most of the crowd around you. Somebody would find the number, ring you, and the real conversation started there.

Anything the website left out, you filled in yourself, in your own voice, over the phone.

That is not how it works now.

Nobody rings anymore.

They look at your website, they make up their own minds, and the ones who decide against you never make a sound.

Now, here is what has actually changed, and it is not what most people assume. It is not that visitors have got harder to please. It is that the bar has been quietly raised on you by businesses you have never competed against in your life.

Think about the day your visitor has had before they ever land on your page. They have ordered a coffee on an app that remembered how they take it. They have checked a flight. They have booked a table for Saturday. They have looked at a room somewhere and seen the price, the dates, the reviews and the cancellation policy without having to ask a single human being anything at all.

Every one of those small moments has trained them. And they have no idea they have been trained. They only know how it feels when something is hard work.

There is one idea I want to put in front of you early on, because I think it changes how you look at your own site for good.

Your visitor does not separate the website from the day out.

In their head, the two things are the same thing.

A clear, handsome, well-organised website promises a clear, handsome, well-organised morning when they arrive. A slow, cluttered, out-of-date one quietly suggests the day itself might be the same. Is that fair? Not a bit of it. You could be giving people the best few hours of their entire holiday off a website that does you no justice whatsoever. But the connection gets made anyway, long before the two of you ever meet, and it colours the way they walk in the door.

Your first hello sets the tone for everything that comes after it.

So what is it they are expecting? Let me go through the main ones, because none of them are unreasonable.

The first is answers, without having to ask for them. What time does it start? Is there parking? Can I bring the young lad? Will I be cold? Somebody planning their trip should be able to find all of that on your website before the notion of ringing you ever crosses their mind. And if they cannot, a good share of them will not go chasing it. They will go to the crowd down the road whose website answered the question.

The second is pricing and availability, out in the open. Not contact us for a quote. Not a brochure you have to download that was put together three years ago. Real prices. What is actually free next Thursday. Enough for a person to make a decision without a phone call. Every extra step you put between a visitor and a decision costs you some of them, and the businesses that make basic information hardest to get are the ones losing bookings they will never even know about.

The third is proof from other people. Somebody planning a few days along the west coast wants reassurance from people who have already been. Recent reviews, specific ones, honest ones, carry enormous weight at that moment. When they are on your website where a visitor can see them, your happiest guests are doing your selling for you. When they are missing, or buried three clicks down, the visitor fills that space with doubt instead. And doubt is expensive.

And the fourth is that the whole lot of it works on a phone. We will come to that properly in the next chapter, but the short version is this. Most of your visitors will only ever see the phone version of your website. If that experience is poor, then this conversation about expectations is over before it starts.

Now. The good news, and it is genuinely good news.

The bar is higher than it used to be, but it is honestly not that high. Most experience businesses in this country are still not doing these things well. Not because they do not care. Because nobody has ever sat down with them and walked them through what actually needs to change.

So getting this right does not just keep you level with everyone else. It puts you out in front of nearly all of them. Your competitors are working off the same old assumptions about what a website is for. A site that treats visitors as grown adults who deserve real information and an easy run at booking will stand out immediately, and it will keep standing out.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Write down the five questions your team gets asked most often, on the phone or by email. The ones you could answer in your sleep at this stage. Then go to your website and check that all five are answered clearly, without anybody having to go digging for them. If they are not, those missing answers are costing you enquiries every single week, and they are among the easiest things in the world to fix.

The second. Look at how your reviews appear on your own website. Are they recent? Are they where a person will actually see them? And are they specific enough to be persuasive? A review saying fantastic experience, highly recommend, is worth something. A review saying we arrived not knowing what to expect and left seeing this part of the country completely differently, and the guide was something else altogether, is worth far more. It is the detail that does the convincing.

And the third. Look at your pricing and your availability and ask yourself honestly whether a visitor could make up their mind without contacting you first. Not whether it is technically possible. Whether it is easy. If you find yourself hesitating even slightly over that answer, you have found the gap worth closing.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

When a website meets people where they expect to be met, the whole character of your bookings changes. Guests arrive better prepared and more confident. They are warmer in that first contact. And the phone calls you do get are from people who are nearly ready to commit, not from people who are only starting to wonder.

Your first hello is the standard you set for everything that follows.

Remember to set it well.