Recently, we hosted a webinar to help hotels make their metasearch channel more profitable with more direct bookings and lower costs. Our digital marketing experts from Travel Tripper shared their insights on managing meta channels effectively and discussed metasearch’s role within a wide digital marketing strategy.
Topics included:
- The history and evolution of metasearch channels
- Bidding and targeting strategies for the major channels
- How to efficiently set up the account and optimize your campaigns
- How to budget for metasearch within your total marketing spend
Why should hotels participate in metasearch?
Metasearch is a channel that doesn’t usually get the attention it deserves, despite the fact that it can play a vital role in a hotel’s marketing mix. Here are four major reasons why it matters:
1. Exposure
In today’s digital landscape, visibility is the key to success. Metasearch is arguably the best way to gain exposure because it instantly shows guests what they’re often looking for: the price of a hotel room. Guests can use any metasearch platform to check real-time prices for their preferred stay dates, then quickly decide if a hotel fits their budget. If your hotel doesn’t expose its room rates on metasearch, you could easily be losing direct bookings to the OTAs.
2. Control
The huge marketing power of the OTAs enables them to dominate travel booking decisions. Metasearch helps hotels gain back some control by letting them decide the rate for specific stay dates and room types. Rather than endlessly competing with OTAs, metasearch is about giving hotels a way to drive the conversation by creating a baseline for guests to compare.
3. Oversight
Metasearch is often treated as a “set and forget” channel. But now that metasearch channels offer more elaborate bidding features, careful management is more important than ever — not just to position your hotel as a favorable listing, but to gain insight into what’s happening in the marketplace.
Metasearch managers and revenue managers should be in constant conversation about any factors that might impact performance, such as ensuring OTA partners aren’t undercutting their hotel on price and checking price discrepancies for certain stay dates.
4. Marketing mix
The value of metasearch within the marketing mix is growing. When hotels use metasearch to promote their own rates alongside the OTAs, they can position themselves as a more favorable booking option and gain a lot of clicks to their direct booking engine. More potential guests can then be retargeted through a hotel’s existing marketing initiatives to drive conversions.
Which channels should your hotel target?
Google is almost certainly the most important metasearch channel and should be the one that hotels test the water out with. But three other main metasearch channels (TripAdvisor, Kayak, and Trivago) also play a big part in a hotel’s strategic approach — especially when it comes to strategic marketing, such as using platforms with dominant market share in specific overseas locations.
Read rest of the article at traveltripper
Click here to watch a full recording of the webinar
