Digital marketing for hotels.

The rule

Pay for a booking only when its contribution beats its cost, and only for demand that would not have come anyway. Everything else on this page follows from that sentence.

Five stages, one calendar

Give every rupee of spend a stage and a measure before it is spent. A campaign with no stage is noise, and one with no measure cannot be stopped.

The funnel, in arithmetic

Impressions become clicks, clicks become bookings. A hotel’s own site typically converts 1.5 to 2.5 percent of visits.

Return on ad spend is the number agencies report. Turn it upside down to get the cost of acquisition, and set that beside the commission an online travel agent would have charged. Paid search that costs more than the agent has to earn its place another way.

Cost per booking = cost per click ÷ conversion rate. Cost of acquisition = spend ÷ revenue = 1 ÷ ROAS.

Bid on the last click, not the average

A click is worth the contribution of a booking multiplied by the conversion rate. Raise a bid only while the extra clicks cost less than that. Judge the cost of the extra clicks, because the average hides it.

Rank in the auction is the bid multiplied by a quality score. A relevant advertisement and a fast landing page let a hotel outrank an agent who bids more. Fix the page before raising the bid.

Value per click = contribution per booking × conversion rate.

Pay only for demand that is new

Many guests who click a paid link with the hotel’s name in it would have booked anyway. Pause brand-name advertising in one market for two weeks and count what organic search and direct visits recover.

In one worked example only 35 percent of paid bookings proved to be new, and the true return fell from 2.5 times to under half. Report the return on the increment.

Search: being found on Google

• A complete Google Business Profile: categories, photographs, hours, attributes, and answers to questions
• Reviews, in number and in score, answered by a named manager
• A live rate and availability feed, so the hotel’s own price appears beside the agents’
• A fast site built for the phone, with every page one tap from booking
• Pages for what guests search: the destination, weddings, meetings, the restaurant
• Structured data for the hotel, its rooms, offers, events and questions

Organic traffic has a price: the clicks you would otherwise buy. Report it in money each month.

Organic traffic value = organic clicks × the cost per click you would otherwise pay.

Being found by AI assistants

Assistants answer the question and name a few sources. To be one of them, state the facts plainly and identically everywhere: name, place, what the hotel is, who it is for.

• Allow the search crawlers of the assistants in robots.txt, and check that the host or content network does not block them
• Write pages that answer one question each, with the answer in the first two sentences
• Mark up the facts with structured data
• Publish a plain summary for machines at /llms.txt. It is an informal convention, cheap to adopt
• Earn mentions on sites the assistants already trust: the press, directories, associations. These count for more than your own pages

Once a month, put the same five questions a guest would ask to each assistant. Record whether the hotel appears and which source is quoted.

Direct against the agents

At an equal price the agent often wins, because the guest’s card and loyalty points are already stored there. Keep the public rate in parity and add something only the hotel’s site carries: a benefit, not a lower public price.

Rank channels on net rate, after commission. A listing with an agent does send some guests to the hotel’s own site, but only about 7 percent of shoppers switch. Treat the agent as a paid channel.

Net ADR = ADR × (1 − commission) − fixed cost per booking ÷ length of stay.

Social

Give each platform one job. Short video earns reach for the place and the food. A photograph feed is the portfolio that proves taste. Lead forms sell weddings and meetings. One piece of film cut the same way for every platform does none of these well.

For a restaurant, the map listing, the review sites and the guests already in the hotel matter more than paid social.

Reputation is pricing power

A hotel whose review score rose by one point on a five-point scale could raise its price by about 11 percent and hold its occupancy (Anderson). Photographs matter too: doubling the photographs on a listing raised both bookings and rate in one large study.

Fix the product and answer the reviews first. Then raise the rate. Never the other way round.

The monthly report

Direct share

of room nights and of revenue

Cost of acquisition

by channel, beside the agent’s commission

Conversion rate

of the website and of the booking engine separately

Organic traffic value

in money

Incremental bookings

from the last pause test

Review score and volume

against the competitive set

AI citations

from the monthly five questions

Net RevPAR

the number all of this exists to move