How can you ensure your hotel is visible when potential guests search online? Travellers have more information, more choices, and higher expectations than ever before. To really understand how they make decisions, you need to shop like a traveller. See your property through their eyes, anticipate what they are looking for, and be there to meet them at the right moments.
NB: This is an article from GuestRevu
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The principle is simple: search for your hotel the way guests do, identify gaps or opportunities, and optimise your presence across search, listings, and review platforms. But in the age of AI and ever-changing search behaviour, understanding the traveller’s journey and how they encounter your hotel online is even more important if you want to turn that first glance into a confident booking.
See Your Hotel Through the Traveller’s Eyes
Imagine a couple planning a weekend getaway to Cornwall. They’ll probably start online, browsing destinations, Googling “boutique hotel on the Cornish coast”, scrolling through photos, reading a few reviews, watching videos, or asking their AI of choice for recommendations. In that moment, they are already forming an impression. Is your hotel the one that makes them pause, imagine themselves there, and click to book, or do small inconsistencies leave them unsure?
Hotels that succeed today are not just visible; they are discoverable, trustworthy, and relevant at every step of the guest journey.
To start, search for your hotel as if you were a traveller.
This is the most basic part of managing your online image, but it is often overlooked. When you want to find out more about something online, your first port of call is usually Google. Remember that your prospective guests don’t know your website URL, social media handles, and where to find your online travel agent listings, but you can be pretty sure that they know how to use Google.
What appears on the first page of Google’s search results when you search your establishment’s name is what people will find out about you first online. Is your hotel website on the first page of the results? When you Google your town or area, do you come up?
