Your hotel or restaurant website after summer: what to fix before next season

In August there's no time to touch anything and by May it's too late. The real window to fix a hospitality website in Mallorca is the winter months, and this is the list in order of what pays back most.

There's a conversation we have every September with hospitality clients and it always opens the same way: "we should have fixed this back in March." In August nobody can stop to rebuild a website, and by May, when there's finally a moment, the season is arriving and touching anything feels risky. The real window is these months, between occupancy dropping and starting to climb again. If you're only going to do one thing this winter, do it with some judgement.

First, and by far the biggest money mover: direct bookings. Every booking that arrives through an OTA carries a commission you never get back, and the only way to claw some of that back is for your own website to make booking just as easy. You don't need to compete with Booking on catalogue; you need the people who already searched for you by name — far more of them than you'd think — not to end up booking elsewhere because your form is a chore.

Second is mobile speed, and Mallorca has a quirk here that gets ignored far too often: a good share of your visitors open your site on a phone, standing in the street, on patchy coverage and sometimes on roaming data. A site that takes five seconds to load in your office on fibre can be unusable out there. That's the real usage scenario and almost nobody tests it.

Third is languages, and not just the homepage. It's common to find hotels with a translated front page while the rooms page, the services page or the directions are Spanish-only. The German visitor who gets that far and hits a wall leaves — and that visit already cost you, either in advertising or in ranking.

Fourth is the menu, if you run a restaurant. The PDF hanging off your website is heavy, unreadable on a phone and has to be re-uploaded every time a price changes. That's why we built TapMallorca: an NFC chip on the table that the customer taps with their phone to see the current menu, leave you a Google review or join the WiFi. No more reprinting QR codes every season.

And fifth, which isn't the website but shapes everything else: reviews. In hospitality your Google listing drives more visits than any redesign, and reviews don't arrive on their own — they arrive when somebody asks at the right moment. If you're only going to change one habit this winter, make it that one.

We've worked with very different hotels and venues across the island — Es Petit Hotel Valldemossa, Mon Hotels, Hostal Villaverde, Café Barbera — and the order above repeats fairly reliably. If you don't know where your own starting point is, audit your site for free: in thirty seconds you'll have speed, SEO and visibility measured, and this winter's list writes itself.