Where do most travelers begin planning their trips? Is it on Booking.com, Expedia or TripAdvisor? Not likely. Think about your own web activity. Most of us start our initial research for everything on Google.
Google has an unrivalled advantage when it comes to traffic: an estimated 4.5 billion searches are made per day on Google, accounting for 77% of the world’s total search traffic. Now while only a small percentage of these searches are for travel and accommodation, that’s still a lot of traffic for their current metasearch offering, Hotel Ads.
So what are Hotel Ads?
Google Hotel Ads is a meta-search platform originally called Google Hotel Finder that was launched in 2011. The platform displays your hotel rates in direct comparison to the OTAs, enabling you to showcase your hotels on Google, across desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.
By providing Google with up-to-date information on pricing, availability and room types, it can show relevant hotel ads to future guests who are actively searching for accommodation either on Google Search or Google Maps.
For example if a user performs a generic search for “hotel in London” they will initially see a search results page similar to this one with some paid and organic results.
What stands out on this page is the hotel section which shows organic search results and allows the user to refine with filters like dates of stay, number of guests, price range and hotel star rating among others.
Once the filters are engaged the user will be brought to a page like this which shows the available hotels in list format and within a map.
The user can then click on a hotel that grabs their attention. This will bring them to the Hotel Details Card which provides information about that specific hotel like their hotel description, image gallery and guest reviews. All this information pulls from the hotels Google My Business page but more about that later.
