The Holiday & Tourism Market Online
If you search for almost anything related to hotels, flights, holiday generally, you’ll see the same websites at the top of the list, time and time again. If you own or run a hotel, guest house or B&B, this domination of the search results means it’s now almost impossible to appear anywhere close to the top of Google’s search list.
booking.com, tripadvisor.com, kayak.com, ebookers.com among many other OTAs (‘Online Travel Agencies’) are committed to intercepting your business – and taking a cut for it. It’s old data, I know, but I read that TripAdvisor spent close to $300 million in 2020, for online advertising alone. No TV or press advertising, just online ads. Unless you think your hotel or guest house can compete at that level, you’ll find it next to impossible to appear at the top of the list.
Of course, they do offer something in return – guests to you! Booking.com particularly performs well for most hotels, but comes at a significant cost. Hotel owners can expect to pay anything between 10% and 25% of their accommodation charge, averaging around 15%. Guests also tend to trust these larger companies, when it comes to cancelations and payment returns.
That said, there are ways around this market dominance. They’re not quick fixes, by any means, but a slow and methodical approach to building a database of guests will always pay off in the long term. Once you’ve attracted some potential guests, we can re-target those people with advertising campaigns on Google, plus regular email campaigns to make sure your name in on their minds when they do actually book.
And the 15% goes in to your pocket, not boooking.com’s.
“HOW ORGANIC SEARCH IS BECOMING INEFFECTIVE FOR HOTELS ON GOOGLE”
A fairly depressing article if you’re in the hotel trade. The days of your hotel, guest house or B&B appearing on Google’s page 1 are now almost dead. Read more…
https://www.phocuswire.com/Google-SERP-online-travel-agencies
2023 Holiday Statistics
Another interesting article I found, “38+ Online Travel Booking Statistics (Latest 2023 Figures)”.
https://www.dreambigtravelfarblog.com/blog/online-travel-booking-statistics