It’s always good practice to look at how the big online travel agents (OTAs) behave operationally in order to identify what best practices can be taken away for your own everyday hotel business operations. From how they build their visibility online through to their cutting-edge conversion tactics, OTAs are highly optimised and very good at what they do, so there’s always something to learn.
Visibility at the core of OTA strategy
In recent months there’s been considerable noise in the industry after Priceline Group Inc released its Form 10-K 2016 Annual Report detailing the unimaginable sums of money they spent in online advertising in 2016. It wasn’t only the $3.5B that impressed, but also the fact that it represented an increase of nearly 30% year on year. How could it happen that such a big group that already owns the largest market shares in most of the markets it operates in saw fit to increase its own online advertising spend by such a margin? What changed market dynamics so dramatically?
The reason why Priceline has kept putting – and indeed increasing – spend in online advertising is actually clearly stated in its Annual Report and is no secret. It is the exact same goal that every hotelier in the industry also faces:
Generating bookings is the ultimate and definitive goal as this is the only road to profitability: and how the goal can be pursued in first instance looks very clear to Priceline: make a massive investment in online advertising.
Where is the spend?
However it’s not really about the quantity of the spend but the quality. How is this huge amount of money actually spent by Priceline? On what campaigns? Which platforms are they capitalizing on in terms of generating visibility? This information is also conveniently stated in the report, namely:
