The Hotels vs OTA Paid Search War – Get Your Defensive Strategy Right
Here’s another great guest post by the team at Mirai Espana, this time by Pablo Delgado and César López. This post examines how 3rd Party Retailers / OTAs capture business intended directly for hotels…and how to approach / fix the problem. Also evaluated is the value OTAs CAN add, i.e. via generic and destination level searches.
How Online Travel Agencies (OTA) or 3rd Party intermediaries get the customers that are searching for you on the web
PART 1: The problem
In Continental Europe, hotels with registered trademarks can prevent intermediaries from using their brand names in Google Adwords. Doing this means that more users end up on their own websites. In spite of the advantages, most independent hotels don’t take the necessary steps to benefit from it.
Did you think you were first in line? Others are cutting in front of you.
Your 1st place is barely visible
RoomKey.com – What’s the value proposition for customers?
There’s a lot of buzz in the industry about the new meta search engine launched by 6 hotel giants…there’s clearly a great value proposition here for hoteliers… but what about the customers? I still don’t see any clear differentiators that would have customers used to popular OTAs switch over to using this site (no packaging options and limited choice are just two simple hurdles).
Launching this new brand in a cluttered distribution space and competiting head-on with OTAs on search at sustainable / advantageous costs is another story altogether.
It’s still early days of course…but what do YOU think? “Hit” or “miss”?
Transparency, the Internet and good hospitality – All the hotel’s a stage…
We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life. - Christof (Ed Harris): The creator of The Truman Show
You may remember the above dialogues from an old big screen favourite, The Truman Show, released in 1998. The movie is above an insurance salesman who discovers his entire life is actually a TV show. While the comedy and irony of the script is quite entertaining, who amongst us has never felt like they were being ‘watched’? Whether it’s the TV version of ‘Big Brother’ or something out of the catacombs of government surveillance, the world’s become a big stage…but just who’s watching who? And what in the world does this have to do with hospitality?
You’ve got to agree that the way hotels work today are far removed from the inns of yore. Consumer access to information and improved transparency, at least in the shadowy world of pricing, has made many a ‘Basil Fawlty’ squirm and shudder. The Internet has been a great equalizer, but how far have we come…and what can hoteliers expect in the future?
