SEO & CRO Digital Performance Agency for Hotels.

Online Travel Agents (OTAs), such as Booking.com and Expedia, present a significant challenge for Hotels, impacting their direct bookings and profit margins. With OTA's dominating search engine results, Independent Hotels struggle to compete and maintain control over their pricing and branding. According to recent studies, OTA's account for 52% of online hotel bookings, leaving Hotels reliant on their platforms for visibility and bookings.

They're not all bad; OTAs are a great equaliser for the market, allowing newcomers to the industry to get a foot in the door by presenting their hotel accommodation or holiday package alongside more established hospitality businesses. They're also convenient for consumers and give hotels and travel companies access to a huge audience. But they do come at a cost, with booking commissions ranging between 10-30% of the room rate.

For better or worse, OTAs are here to stay, and for most hotels, hospitality businesses and travel companies, they will remain a valuable and effective route to market. However they should not be your ONLY route to market and it's time to reduce your dependence upon them by increasing your direct bookings. In so doing, you'll increase your profit margin by up to 30%.

OTAs have huge budgets (you're paying them on average 16% of your revenue!), vast numbers of backlinks and impeccable authority and trust scores; basically they're scoring an A+ in every key ranking factor and you're not going to beat them head-on. Our SEO strategy for hotels and travel companies is straight out of David and Goliath, taking the fight to them on our terms to outwit and outrank where they're weakest.

We discover and exploit keyword opportunities that have been overlooked, create targeted content and useful information resources that provide value to your audience and attract them at an earlier stage of the shopping process - we won't wait for them to land on Booking.com to compare hotels in Brockenhurst, we'll snag them when they search for "where to stay in the New Forest with spa and great walks" and send them directly to our website. That's a slightly flippant example and there's a lot more to it, but you know that if we get involved with your website, Google's going to love it.

Of course there's always PPC such as Google Adwords. This could be considerably cheaper than OTAs providing you're able to accurately track and attribute the conversions to measure and monitor your return on ad spend (ROAS) - our business intelligence platform can help with this, as well as identifying where to focus spend in order to maximise your ROAS.

Getting to the top of Google and driving traffic is only half the battle; what about when the user arrives on your website? This is where UX and CRO comes into play - keeping your customer engaged with clear signposting throughout the customer journey, directing them from landing page to conversion - reducing friction points, plugging holes where you experience drop-offs and optimising the conversion rate to make the most of each penny spent and every site visitor. This is where our digital performance tracking & reporting dashboard really scores, providing accurate and actionable insight into user engagement and interaction to guide decision making.

With improved ranking on search engine results pages (SERP) accounting for increased website traffic and a website that has been tuned and optimised to convert visitors into customers, you can expect to see a significant increase in direct bookings. In some cases, we've managed to increase the ratio of direct bookings for hotels to nearly 90%, with just 10% of total bookings coming from OTAs.

Whilst that sort of result doesn't come without some PPC spend, the overall increase in profit margin on room revenue can be up to 30% along with a reduced dependence upon OTAs. There is also huge value in more customers landing on your site and seeing your brand; increasing brand awareness, buy-in, loyalty and understanding of what you stand for as a business. You're not just building revenues today, you're building a future for your hotel or travel business.