Hotels marketing
Move bookings off the OTA without losing the volume
The same room is sold twice over: once to a guest who found you, and once to a guest an intermediary found and charged you a fifth of the rate to introduce. Both fill the room. Only one leaves you the margin and the guest.
Search behaviour
What your customers are typing
Destination, dates and a filter
The shortlist is built here, usually inside an intermediary or a map, before any hotel website is opened.
- hotels in [city] centre
- hotel near [venue] with parking
- boutique hotel [region] with a pool
- dog friendly hotel [area]
- family rooms [city] hotel
- hotel with late check out [city]
Your property, by name
Already decided. Every one of these is a booking you have earned, and the one most often bought back from you.
- [hotel name] official site
- [hotel name] direct booking
- [hotel name] reviews
- [hotel name] parking
- [hotel name] cancellation policy
Demand attached to an event or a reason
Dated, predictable and the most profitable demand a property gets, because the guest has to be there.
- hotels near [stadium] for [event]
- where to stay for [festival]
- hotels near [conference centre]
- hotel near [wedding venue] with shuttle
- hotel near [hospital] for family
Doubt, price and comparison
The last few minutes before booking. Cheap to answer on your own site and almost always left to somebody else.
- is it cheaper to book direct or on [ota]
- do hotels charge resort fees
- best time to book a hotel room
- [hotel name] vs [hotel name]
- what does a hotel deposit cover
These are examples of how customers in this market search, drawn from keyword research and from the questions that come up on sales calls. They are illustrative, not a volume claim — the actual demand in your area is something we size before recommending anything.
What usually goes wrong
Where hotel marketing tends to fail
A hotel sells the same room twice over. Once to a guest who found the property and booked it, and once to a guest an online travel agent found and charged fifteen to twenty-five per cent to introduce. Both fill the room for the night. Only one of them leaves you the margin and the guest's email address.
The argument is almost never about leaving the intermediaries, which for most properties is a bad trade. It is about which of those bookings should have been direct and were not, what it costs to move them, and how much of the difference survives after the cost of moving them.
- You pay commission on guests who already knew your name.
- Somebody sees the property, decides they like it, searches the name, and clicks the first result, which is frequently an advertisement bought by an intermediary bidding on your brand. The stay was already yours; the introduction fee was not necessary. Defending brand searches with your own listing, making the official site obviously the official site, and getting the metasearch position right recovers bookings you had already earned.
- The booking engine undoes everything the website achieved.
- A guest reaches the site, likes the property, clicks book, and is handed to a different-looking system that asks for dates again, shows a spinner, hides the total until the last screen, and does not work well on a phone. Every intermediary has spent years polishing that exact flow. The engine is where direct bookings are lost, and it is usually treated as a procurement decision rather than as the most important page on the site.
- Direct has nothing to offer that the intermediary does not.
- Parity clauses stop you undercutting the public rate, and most properties conclude there is nothing left to say. There generally is: flexible cancellation, choice of a specific room, early check-in when available, parking included, a late checkout, breakfast, or a rate available only to people who have stayed before. These sit outside the parity clause in most agreements, and they are the entire substance of a direct booking proposition.
- The photography is doing the selling and it is nine years old.
- Images decide which property on a shortlist gets clicked, and the set most hotels use was shot before the last refurbishment, favours the lobby and the exterior, and avoids the rooms people will actually be given. Current photographs of a standard room, the bathroom, the bed at its real size and the view from a typical floor answer the doubts a guest has, and they set an expectation the stay can meet, which shows up later in the score.
- The review score is treated as reputation rather than as pricing power.
- Score sits inside the filter that builds a shortlist, so a property below a threshold is not shown to a large part of the market regardless of its rate. Recency matters as much as the average, and the response is read more carefully than the complaint. Treating score as an operational number with a target, an owner and a routine for generating recent reviews is one of the few levers that changes what a room can be sold for.
Buying behaviour
How your customers actually decide
Strategy follows this, not the other way round. Everything on this page is downstream of how the decision genuinely gets made.
- The shortlist is built somewhere else. Guests filter on dates, price band, location and score inside an intermediary or a map, and a property that fails one of those filters is never considered no matter how good the website is.
- Score operates as a hard cut rather than a preference. Below a number the property disappears from a large share of searches, and above it the differences between neighbouring scores matter much less than hotels assume.
- Photographs decide the click within the shortlist, and the room and bathroom images decide it more than the exterior does. Guests are trying to work out what they will actually be given.
- Location is judged against a specific reason for the trip rather than against the city. Near the conference centre, walkable from the venue, five minutes from the ward, on the right side of the river: those are the comparisons being made.
- Cancellation flexibility and what is included break the tie between two similar rates. Breakfast, parking and wifi still decide bookings, and a rate that looks cheaper and excludes all three loses more often than it wins.
- The final third of the decision usually happens on your own site. They come to check the reviews are real, find the actual total, and see whether booking direct is worth it, which is the only moment you fully control.
Where the money goes
The channels that earn their place here
In priority order for this business, not a menu. Anything not on this list is something we would need a specific reason to recommend.
Non-brand demand you are not paying commission on
Intermediaries dominate broad destination searches, but they answer specific ones poorly: the hotel near a particular venue, the property with a specific facility, the reason people come to this town at all. Content written around the actual reasons guests travel here reaches people before the shortlist is built, and every booking that comes from it arrives without an introduction fee attached.
Defend your own name in the results
A search for your property is a guest who has already chosen you, and it is routinely intercepted by paid listings from intermediaries bidding on the name. Holding that position, alongside a correctly configured metasearch presence showing your direct rate beside theirs, is usually the fastest and most measurable direct-share improvement available, because you can compare its cost directly with the commission it displaced.
The booking engine is the conversion problem
Most direct bookings are lost between the book button and the confirmation, not before it. The work is availability visible on the first screen, the true total including fees and taxes shown early, room types described in a way that distinguishes them, a mobile flow that does not reset, and removing any step that exists for the property's convenience rather than the guest's.
Score, recency and response as a revenue input
Because score gates visibility, it has to be run as an operational programme rather than a periodic tidy-up: a routine that produces recent reviews from satisfied guests, responses written for the person reading in three weeks rather than for the reviewer, and a way to spot the recurring operational complaint before it becomes the pattern everyone mentions.
Past guests are the cheapest room nights you sell
A guest who has already stayed knows the bed, the breakfast and the walk from the station, and they book direct more readily than anyone else. That makes the guest list the highest-margin demand you have: a note timed to the season they visited last, an offer on the nights that are genuinely soft, and a reason to come back that is not a discount to somebody who would have paid.
Measurement
What we report on, and what we ignore
Sessions are not on this list. These are the numbers that tell you whether the marketing is producing customers.
- Direct booking share of room nights, tracked month over month against the same period last year
- Contribution per room night after commission, rather than gross revenue
- Cost per direct booking by channel, compared with the commission it displaced
- Booking engine completion rate from availability search through to confirmation
- Average daily rate and occupancy reported separately for direct and intermediated bookings
- Review score, review recency and the proportion of reviews answered
- Repeat guest share and room nights driven by the guest list
- Booking window by segment, because it decides when spend has to be live to matter
The website
What the site has to do for this customer
- A booking engine reachable in one tap, showing real availability and rates on the first screen
- The total price shown early, including mandatory fees and taxes, not revealed at the payment step
- Current room photography including the bathroom, the actual bed size and the view from a typical floor
- What the direct rate includes that the intermediary listing cannot show
- Accessibility described accurately: step-free routes, door widths, bathroom fittings, lift access
- Location content written around the reasons people come here rather than around the city
- Reviews on the page with the score and how recent they are, not a curated set of quotations
- A cancellation policy stated plainly next to the rate it applies to
- Fast on a phone on mobile data, since a lot of this is booked in transit
Constraints
What the rules allow, and what they do not
How room prices must be displayed is regulated and the rules have tightened in several markets. Requirements around showing a total that includes mandatory fees, resort or facility charges and taxes, and around when a price may be shown excluding them, differ by country and often by state or province, and enforcement in this area has been active. We build rate display to the rules of the markets you sell into and ask you to confirm the detail with your own legal adviser. Nothing here is legal advice.
Accessibility statements create reliance and are regulated. Describing rooms, bathrooms, entrances and facilities as accessible is a representation a guest will book on, and both the physical requirements and the obligation to publish accurate access information vary by jurisdiction. Website accessibility itself is now a legal requirement in a growing number of markets. We describe what you have measured rather than what the room is called.
Rate parity is a contractual matter with a competition-law dimension in some markets, and what your distribution agreements permit you to advertise differs by agreement and by country. Before publishing any claim that booking direct is cheaper or better value, we ask you to confirm with your legal adviser what your contracts and local rules allow, and we build the direct proposition around inclusions that sit outside parity where they do not.
Questions
Questions we get from this industry
The travel agents bring us real business. Should we still push direct?
Yes, and not by trying to leave them. They produce genuine discovery, particularly in shoulder season and in markets where you have no presence, and disappearing hands that demand to the property next door.
The target is the mix rather than the volume. The bookings worth moving are the ones where the guest already knew you and the intermediary simply appeared first. Those are identifiable, and recovering them costs a fraction of the commission they carry.
Rate parity stops us being cheaper direct. What can we offer?
Everything that is not the rate. Flexible cancellation, choice of a specific room, early check-in where possible, a late checkout, parking, breakfast, or a returning-guest rate that is not publicly displayed.
Most agreements constrain the price you publish rather than what you include with it, but the wording varies. Check your specific contracts with your legal adviser before building a proposition on any of it, because the difference between agreements is real.
Our occupancy is strong. Is there anything to fix?
Occupancy tells you the rooms are full, not what they earned. A property running at high occupancy with two thirds of it intermediated has a profit problem that no occupancy report will ever show.
The number worth watching is contribution per room night after commission. When it is flat while occupancy rises, the growth is being bought, and the correction is a distribution question rather than a demand one.
How much does the review score really affect what we can charge?
More than most operators expect, because it acts as a filter before it acts as persuasion. Guests set a minimum score in the search, so below that threshold the property is not shown at all and the rate becomes irrelevant.
Above the threshold, recency does most of the work. A property with a steady flow of recent reviews reads as currently good, while an older high average reads as a hotel that used to be. That is why the routine matters more than any single score.
Is a new website or a new booking engine the priority?
Usually the booking engine, because it is where the money is lost. A good site handing over to a slow, three-screen engine converts worse than a plain site with a fast one.
The practical order is to measure the drop-off from availability search to confirmation first. If the loss is concentrated inside the engine, changing the website will not help, and if the site is not producing engine sessions at all then the problem is upstream and the engine is fine.
What should we do about the photography?
Reshoot the rooms first, including the bathroom, the bed at its real size and the view from a typical floor rather than the best one. Those are the images that answer what a guest is actually uncertain about.
Then keep the set current after any refurbishment, and make sure the same images are on your own site, in the profile and in the distribution listings. A property that looks like three different hotels across three surfaces loses bookings at the comparison stage.
Find out what is realistically winnable in your market
A strategy call is a working session on your hotel business specifically — your area, your competitors, the searches that matter and what it would take to compete for them. If we do not think we can move it, we will tell you.
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal