Many innkeepers and tour operators are still making this mistake with their “contact us” page… they list an email address without a contact form. When a person clicks on an e-mail address it usually opens up the default e-mail client on their computer… this is normally Outlook express or Apple’s Thunderbird… when you compose a message in these programs and click send the message will go nowhere unless they have their POP3 or IMAP settings properly setup. People with Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, and other webmail email addresses will not have Outlook or Thunderbird configured and you may never receive their message. This leads to lost bookings and unhappy customers.

I use a couple different contact form services… my favorite is formmail.com. Another popular solution is Wufoo.com. I used to recommend Jotform but they have been having issues lately so they are off of my favorites list.