How to Protect Your Hotel from Booking

Try doing this search on Google: “grand hotel rimini”

The screen you’ll see will definitely look something like this:

As you can see, among the first PAID results the Grand Hotel of Rimini does NOT appear!!! How is that possible? But whose sites are those? And why are they “attracting” traffic that in theory shouldn’t be theirs?

The situation is very similar if we look at the NON-PAID results. Just search “hotel byron ravenna” and see what comes up…

As you can see with your own eyes, the first result is… TripAdvisor!!! In this case the investment was not direct through paid campaigns, but indirect, through highly optimized search engine optimization (SEO).

Doesn’t all this seem strange to you? It is, but the explanation is simple: those sites belong to companies called OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) in industry jargon. These large companies know very well that if they pay Google to be visible using other people’s keywords (in this case “Grand Hotel Rimini”) they will certainly have more opportunities to “capture” a booking compared to more generic keywords (for example: “hotel with pool rimini”).

In practice, these OTAs do nothing but EXPLOIT others’ brands to divert bookings to their platforms. The questions you should ask yourself are: why should I leave all that traffic to them? Why can’t I protect my brand? How much will it cost me to protect my brand and therefore my “keyword” on Google?

Very often protecting your brand costs very little, because the names of tourist/hospitality facilities in Italy are very imaginative. Creating paid advertising campaigns with an extremely limited budget (from 1 euro to 5 euros per day) guarantees you’ll be present and RECOVER those bookings that you’re now leaving to Booking & Co.

If you’ve never heard what you just read from anyone else, then contact us immediately using the form below, we’ll call you back as soon as possible.

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