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Gaining online visibility for your hotel brand

December 08, 2011 | Hotel Marketing

Hotel managers need to be realistic. Large OTAs spend tens of millions per month on SEO/SEM, and advertise on hundreds of thousands of keywords. So, becoming the #1 on “hotels in New York” is probably not an option. But there are some niche strategies that work.

Hotel distribution changes every 10 years. In the 1980s it was the GDS, in the 1990s the emergence of tour operators like TUI and Thomas Cook and in the 2000s the adoption of the Internet and Online Travel Agents. At the beginning of the decade of the 2010s, we can already see a shift happening to digital marketing.
Hotel digital marketing is the response to consumer changes – consumers are much more “educated” in travel search, and they use “multi-channel”: OTAs, direct website, review sites, social media, mobile.

Never before were there so many search products: OTAs, meta-search like kayak.com, the new Google Flight Search and Hotel Finder and hipmunk.com, the “cool” new search interface on top of Orbitz’s inventory. In addition, the planning tools market is exploding. TripIt and TripCase are more traditional travel planners, but a whole slew of new social tools is emerging with Gogobot leading the pack, but also with new competitors like gtrot, flymuch and others. Lastly, new products are now transactional online: restaurants at OpenTable, tours and activities using Viator and even derivative accommodation products using AirBnB, a new darling of Silicon Valley VCs.

So, against this backdrop of exploding choices, how does a hotel manager make its brand visible online?

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