Bethel on the web

At Bethel, we have a darn good team. In terms of service quality we are the best in Coorg where homestays are concerned. Today one of the biggest problems we face are ones that are nice to have..we are more often than not completely full and very often direct folks to other homestays.

A year ago, the story was completely different. We were struggling, we never really ran empty but every full weekend was a bonus and generous discounts would leave us with nothing, but we were still happy that the show was going on!!! We had only one sales channel, old guests who had known Rakesh or our friends / family who wanted to come to Coorg.

The only advertisement we had was the word of mouth from our guests.

Then we moved to the Web, we made our website http://www.bethelestate.com, started listing ourselves in HolidayIQ and any and every travel site that we could find and who would list us :-). In the beginning it seemed like a big waste of time and money, a month or so passed and we never got any inquiry from the web. Then we got a call from Priyanka, that was the first drop, the drop turned to a trickle and the trickle now is a full stream (can't call it a flood just yet). Today almost 60 % of our guests are new and coming from the web!!

We spend quite some time on our online real estate, we have Google analytics enabled to see how we are faring over time, Google webmaster tools to analyze our website content to see how we stand in Google rankings and now for the first time we have put out an paid listing in Raahi!!! (We get listed as popular properties in their website bed and breakfast section) and soon we will start with Google AdWords (and maybe even Google AdSense, have to decide on that yet)

We realize we turn up in quite a few unexpected places!! for example, about.com has an article titled "8 Romantic India Getaways" , which lists the "rustic jungle cottages of Bethel Estate" as one the places that people can visit in Coorg. Now, how on earth did we get in that article!!! (Well, we don't mind it at all :-) )

The same way, few of our guests have blogged about us or have uploaded pics, here are a few links in the web that point back at Bethel..

http://www.arvinsharma.com/nggallery/post/weekend-at-coorg/

http://www.yeeeeee.com/2009/04/16/my-beautiful-trip-to-india-30-pics/

http://koide9.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-travel.html