Together these technology providers are streamlining event data and pulling group room block information — including room types, rates and allocations — from the Tripleseat sales-and-catering system and pushing it into Maestro PMS. This automated process ensures that clean data is available to sales-and-catering teams in real time, eliminating headaches for meeting planners and greatly improving the stay experiences of event attendees.

“The Maestro/Tripleseat integration partnership was formed at the request of our mutual customers,” said Warren Dehan, Maestro President. “Together, we are enabling group sales and catering teams to book, manage, and plan guest room blocks and share that information with Maestro PMS for fast and accurate booking and billing. Not only does Tripleseat push the name of room block details, but it enables operators to better forecast inventory and revenue. There are a lot of moving pieces when it comes to event management. Tripleseat and Maestro PMS are streamlining communication to prevent operational disasters like overbooking from ever happening.”

Features of the Maestro PMS and Tripleseat integration include:

• Room inventory is sent from Maestro PMS to Tripleseat once a day for the next 365 days.
• Guest room block from Tripleseat to Maestro: Once the guest room block is created in Tripleseat, the room block details will go into Maestro in real time and create the group in Maestro. In addition to rates and room types, information sent to the PMS will include the following: block release date, booking name, room block name, account and contact, and booking notes.
• Guest room block pickup from Maestro to Tripleseat: When a room is picked up in Maestro, it will update the pickup count in Tripleseat and on the hotel, resort, or conference center’s guest portal. Occupancy will be reflected in pickup counts. Pickup updates occur in real time.

“Hotel management is a complex business. We are thrilled to partner with Maestro PMS, streamlining group booking and events management and reduce the room for error by teams working in silos,” said Jonathan Morse, CEO of Tripleseat. “Our mutual clients requested this integration, and we are always happy to help make their job easier.”

As hotel operators work towards closing the labor gap, integration partnerships like Maestro PMS and Tripleseat are enabling operators to work smarter, not harder. This joint solution not only ensures that no event details or revenues slip through the cracks, but it greatly improves the event experience for planners and attendees alike. The smoother the stay, the more likely group business will return.

“We are delighted to be working with Tripleseat to lessen the stress placed on today’s operators and planners,” Dehan said. “Together we are working towards increasing sales and positive online reviews without increasing a hotel’s workload. The Global Meetings and Events Forecast shows ‘in-person meetings are roaring back in 2023 and have already surpassed 2019 levels’ across North America. While attendees want to see each other in person after suffering from virtual fatigue, the costs to support these guests continue to rise due to higher labor, food, and other fixed costs, not to mention the impact of inflation. We as hotel technologists must continue to work together to create ways to offset workload for staff, streamline operations, and ultimately exceed the expectations of guests.”

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The rise of Chinese travel in the last two decades means that the proportion of travelers affected by the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak has surpassed the 2003 SARS health crisis. But the hospitality industry has been through crises before – and proved that hotels that made smart strategic decisions can come out winners in the long-term.

The post How Hoteliers Can Optimize Their Digital Marketing Spend During a Market Downturn appeared first on .

For starters, let’s talk about Triptease’s Guest Intelligence Platform capabilities. How does the solution work, what are the benefits, and who are your customers?

The Triptease Platform exists to help hoteliers own their guest and drive more direct bookings. OTAs (online travel agents) are so good at what they do because they have enormous data scale and the ability to test and iterate quickly. The Platform offers these benefits to hoteliers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access them.

There are different parts to the platform –  Parity, Metasearch, Targeted Messages, Live Chat, Retargeting, and Insights. Whenever we add a product, we make sure it strengthens the performance of the platform as a whole.

We really see parity as the core of everything we do; unless a hotel has the best rates available online, the performance of its website will be limited. With our other products, we bring sophisticated personalization to the hotel’s current website, booking engine, and off-site traffic acquisition.

We’re obsessive about direct bookings. We combine a unique understanding of every guest with the value of their trip, and use this calculation to inform the targeting, bidding and messaging decisions we make.

Earlier this year, Triptease introduced a wider portfolio of services with the aim of giving hotels more control over their distribution. What are some of these newer capabilities? What have been the results?

The newest additions to the platform are our Metasearch and Retargeting solutions. We spent five years tracking millions of guests on hotel websites with Parity and Messages. Now we’re using that powerful data to drive industry-beating results from our new off-site tools.

With Metasearch, we’re taking a totally different approach to the norm. Hotels usually set up their bids and just let them run. We think that’s crazy – it’s so inefficient. It means we see many hotels bidding to advertise on Google when they have a more expensive rate than the OTAs. That has to be the worst idea ever! What we do is use live, real-time data – including parity data – to make dynamic bidding decisions that make sure the hotel always spends the right amount on the best guests.

Retargeting is the most recent addition to our platform. We know this is a huge area of potential for hotels – nearly 90% of guests visit a hotel website before their stay. So many guests coming to your website and then choosing to book via an OTA or other third party. This is crazy. It is maddening. With precision targeting we use a hotel’s own data to determine which guests are likely to book and bring them back to the hotel website for that booking.  We’re also putting live prices, and a live price comparison, within a display ad. Price is still the leading factor in guest decision-making, so being able to prove you have the best rate to guests around the web is hugely impactful and saves bookings from being lost to OTAs.

How is the world of direct booking changing and evolving and how is Triptease playing a role in this evolution?

We’re obsessed with direct and see our role as helping to define and share best practice across the industry. For example we run three Direct Booking Summits a year. They provide an opportunity to gather hoteliers together to share stories and raise challenges Thousands of hoteliers are watching the talks each year, either at the events or online afterwards. The most impactful sessions are always those delivered by real hoteliers sharing their stories of success.

This year in Miami, we heard from Colette Labis at Westgate Resorts about how she’s managed to curb the “wholesaler problem” by taking legal action against uncontracted third parties. It’s that kind of first-hand advice that really empowers other hoteliers and drives the movement forward.

From a technology perspective, we’ll continue working to level the playing field between hotels and OTAs, allowing hoteliers to make the most of the rich first-party data at their disposal with automation and artificial intelligence. I don’t think most hoteliers realise how valuable their data is. We’re really trying to get that message out. It’s the key to unlocking direct. For us, it’s important that hoteliers have as much time as possible to do what they do best: provide a wonderful guest experience at their property.

How has the hospitality industry changed and evolved, especially in terms of hotel technology and the solution provider landscape, since you began your career?

The change that has excited me the most has been the joining up of data silos to deliver better guest experience and marketing performance. Hotels have been forced to raise their game in the face of data-savvy OTAs, and the realisation that they are sitting on data gold has created an enthusiasm for cross-platform data-sharing that I suspect will only get stronger.

What are some of the trends you’re seeing within the industry today?

The lines between different distribution channels are already very blurred, and I think we’re going to see that trend continue as hotels, OTAs, wholesalers and metasearch engines all vie for dominance in the online sphere. We’ve already seen Marriott sign an exclusive wholesale distribution deal with Expedia, and we can expect to see more of the same as the big chains work to eliminate leaking rates. Wholesalers themselves are having to work hard to convince hotels of their trustworthiness and value. I am certain wholesalers are going to have to evolve their model to remain relevant.

And of course, there’s Google. They already had a huge impact this year when they launched their standalone booking site for hotels. It’s clear that travel is an enormous growth area for them, and we should expect to see more noises of concern coming from Booking Holdings and Expedia as Google’s influence grows.

What, in your view, are the biggest opportunities that are now available to hotel operators due to recent advances in technology? How can they best take advantage of these opportunities?

The biggest opportunity available to hotels is making the most of the data goldmine that they’re sitting on: joining up their data across their siloed systems and using that combined data to deliver great guest experiences.

Are most hotel operators making the right decisions in terms of their technology infrastructure? Are their properties generally achieving their potential in terms of revenue performance as well as the quality of the guest experience, or is there a lot of room for improvement?

Things are getting better, but there’s a long way to go. We often see hotels being hamstrung by their internal structure and how it dictates where investment is placed. For something like traffic acquisition spend, for example, efficiency can vary widely depending on whether the Marketing or Distribution department controls the budget (Marketing budgets are typically fixed; Distribution tends to be based on performance). There’s definitely room for improvement in alignment across departments and eliminating conflicting incentives.

As far as technology is concerned, where should hotel operators be focusing their time, energy and IT resources? What technology-enabled business initiative(s) are likely to provide the biggest payoffs?

It can be tempting to invest in a big, buzz-worthy technology overhaul such as implementing a new loyalty scheme or CRM and expect it to drive your bookings through the roof. But without getting the basics right, the performance of other investments will be limited. For a hotel just starting out with their direct booking strategy, we’d recommend beginning with an investment in the website basics: easy navigation, mobile-friendly booking engine, basic offer messaging, an effective SEM strategy. Then of course, there’s parity. This has to be the absolute bedrock of your online strategy. Investing in a parity monitoring tool such as Triptease and acting on it regularly will pay itself back many times over in reduced OTA commissions.

Once some of these things are in place, it makes sense to move on to more sophisticated tactics such as increased website personalization, metasearch bidding, revenue optimization, or an upsell strategy. But getting the basics right will lead to the biggest payoff in the end.

Any other thoughts about the hospitality industry, particularly with respect to technology innovation and emerging trends? Is there anything about where the industry is today that surprises you?

I think that as hotels use their data more assiduously, the ROI from their marketing spend will improve and hotels will start to reach a tipping point where a dollar spent in marketing delivers a far better return and guest experience than another dollar spent with an OTA. We see it with our most progressive clients, and following a simple set of steps I believe most hotels can recapture more guest relationships and make their marketing really deliver.

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In total, 36 industry-leading speakers coming together to provide their hotel strategies for 2020. The following are some key takeaways from just three of the speaker sessions, courtesy of Triptease. (To access the full report, please click here.)

Bridge the gap: the challenges between digital marketing and revenue management

Dan Wacksman, Former SVP Marketing & Distribution, Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, Principal,
Sassato LLC

Drawing from his experience in the hotel industry, Dan examined the problems that exist between teams, and provided actionable tips for rethinking your processes to work better together.

• Revenue and Digital Managers often have different visions of success. They need to be better
  educated about each other’s roles, values and KPIs.
• Confusing your customer with multiple rates, offers and choices can result in abandonment of a
  booking. You need to keep it simple!
• Ensure that your prices are always in parity and your booking process is as simple as on OTA
  websites.
• A really robust data capture model is difficult, but there are some simple things you can start with.
  Most PMSs offer ways to capture some simple but important information bits.
• Data analysis never ends. Educate your staff about data collection, analysis and how you can use it
  to make positive changes.
• Hotels need make sure that membership rates on their websites are the same rates we’re giving out to OTAs. Ease of access to special rates on your direct channel is crucial.
• Stop thinking short-term and instead think about the strategic implications of working with OTAs.
  OTAs have international reach and can help hotels tap into new audiences, but they do things that
  are advantageous to them – they won’t have hotels’ best interests at heart.
• Ask your tech partners what their attribution model is. A last-click attribution model does not make
  sense in today’s multi-touch digital environment.
• The relationship a hotel has with a customer is an intimate relationship – much different from the
  one OTAs have. We need to own that relationship.
• Hotels often focus on Q1 and Q3 strategies. Digital Marketing and Revenue teams need to align their strategies and an often less busy Q2 allows time to bridge the knowledge and perception gaps.

Building a culture of revenue management

Derek Brewster, Director of Revenue Management, Lotte New York Palace

In this session, Derek drew from his experience in an independent hotel to share the five building blocks of a successful revenue management culture – and how you can get there.

• Involve stakeholders in your strategy.
• Think of the overall revenue and profitability targets of the hotel, rather than those of individual silos.
• Know your competitors, staff, and customers inside-out. Attend industry events where you can.
• Articulate your revenue strategy, take into consideration everyone’s feedback and let other teams
  come to your meetings. They will help you understand whether you’re setting goals too high or low, know what guests are saying and how they deliver value.
• The revenue team also needs to attend sales and marketing meetings. It keeps us all focused on the hotel’s goals and long-term strategy over quick fixes.
• Be as deliberate and calculating as you can, because decisions can be risky.
• Leverage strategic partnerships in experiential marketing campaigns.
• Your revenue strategies need to be aligned with every department.
• Support sales efforts by optimizing how you deliver pricing to sales managers in a timely manner.
• Support and engage the digital marketing team by ensuring all promos stay on brand.
• Direct is the most cost-effective channel. It also drives the highest ADR for Lotte New York Palace.
• Have the right resources and technologies available to align teams.
• Accurate, up-to-date data should be the basis of every revenue decision. No gut feelings!
• Know what generates demand. Analyze data and work with sales and marketing teams to attract and retain the most high-value guests.
• Know what pricing and discount strategies competing hotels have and learn from it.
• Know when you lose/gain market share against our competitors.
• Know what the best years of performance were at your hotel – what were your best-performing offers then? Discuss how you can sustain it or repeat that success.
• Be prepared to pivot if you over- or under-estimate a strategy’s impact. Don’t be afraid to make
  mistakes because you can learn and adapt
• Monitor performance to know its effect on top and bottom line.
• Pivot, don’t panic. Panic can bring drops in prices that are difficult to recover from.
• Leverage partnerships and demand and invest in loyalty.
• Find the latest technologies across various industries and adopt them for your hotel.

“Three Strikes and You’re Out!” How to take control of rogue wholesale rates

Colette Labis, Director of Partnerships & Distribution, Westgate Resorts

After making headlines for taking a stand and suing Amoma after they repeatedly violated their terms,
Colette shows the success behind taking the ‘three strike rule’ seriously, and how to navigate the complex world of wholesale rate distribution.

• Rate parity violations cost more than just the difference in rate. Each time you’re going down in your search results you’re losing thousands of dollars in business. They also create disruption with other partners.
• Don’t beat up your market managers for unsavoury company decisions or reach out to them only
  when something is going wrong.
• Be selective when choosing a distribution partner. Westgate Resorts reduced our partnerships to
  only the most impactful because the time and amount they were taking was not worth the revenue.
• Establish a threshold of production. If Westgate Resort’s distribution partner is not hitting it within 12 months, they cut it out.
• Work with partners who are easy to do business with. They should provide flexible terms and
  distribution abilities and not have complicated contracts.
• Tighten your distribution clauses. Define rate structure, package rate, opaque rate and violation
  penalties.
• You can achieve a fully dynamic rate structure through well-established connectivity (API messaging, reservation delivery, promotional and derived rate ability). Follow up with dynamic package rates (wholesaler net rates, package/opaque rates, new “B2B/FIT” rates, managed rates) and room-only rates (float to BAR, set discount to BAR, new “B2C” rates, LRA rates).
• Regularly perform violation shops and test bookings. Shop your hotel in a live environment daily,
  conduct test reservations to determine the source of a problem, and never rely on shop reports.
• Colette believes hotels should not be afraid of taking legal action. There is power in numbers. The
  more hotels stand up to mischievous behaviour coming from third parties, the less cases of bad
  partnerships we will have.

To access the full report, please click here.

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Introducing: Retargeting.

Retargeting is the latest addition to Triptease’s market-leading direct booking software platform for hotels.

Triptease Retargeting significantly increases the return on investment (ROI) of a hotel’s online marketing strategy by intelligently serving personalized, price-led ads to potential guests after they leave a hotel’s website.

“We’re driving a return on investment almost double the industry average by taking a joined-up approach to the guest journey,” explains Charlie Osmond, Triptease’s founder and Chief Tease.

“We put guests in context for the hotel. That allows us to be more efficient with our bidding and more successful with our conversion.”

How it works

Triptease’s algorithmic approach combines search, parity and behavioral data to avoid costly bidding mistakes. With Triptease Retargeting, hotels can avoid common pitfalls such as targeting a visitor if their search dates are in the past, or bidding to advertise when they don’t have the best price available online.

As well as knowing who to target and when to target them, Triptease Retargeting dynamically updates ad creative to show only the messages most likely to convert an undecided guest.

Powered by Triptease’s industry-leading price intelligence, Retargeting allows hotels to show live price comparisons to guests based on their unique search – wherever they are on the web.

“Price remains the single most powerful factor in booking decisions, and we’ve known since the launch of Price Check that a live price comparison gives guests a proven, powerful incentive to book direct,” says Alasdair Snow, Triptease’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer.

“Now, with Retargeting, we’re able to share that message with guests even when they’re not on the hotel website or booking engine. Most importantly, Triptease knows which guests are worth retargeting – and which to ignore.”

The Triptease Platform

Retargeting joins Metasearch, Parity Management, Targeted Messages, Live Chat and Insights on the Triptease Platform.

“Because we can connect data from all parts of the booking journey, we’re able to give guests a much more consistent experience than they would otherwise get,” explains Charlie Osmond.

“If we know a guest has arrived on the booking engine from metasearch, we show them a message based on the details of their search. If we know they’re high-value, we might highlight one of the hotel’s upsell offers. If they leave the site without booking but they’ve displayed signs that they’re interested, we’ll adjust our retargeting bids to make sure they’re reminded of the hotel later.”

“We’re excited to be reaching guests at more stages of their booking journey than ever before. We look forward to continuing to help hotels maximize their direct channel, driving a high volume of incremental bookings and reducing their dependence on OTAs.”

Does your company have news it would like to share with our readers? If so, we invite you to review our editorial guidelines and submit your press release for publishing consideration.

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Measuring the impact of each touchpoint of a conversion can be tricky – the disjoined data from hotel systems and channels makes it hard to know where exactly to allocate your marketing budget. As a result, the last click in the customer journey is often given all of the credit for the conversion, as well as a larger share of the budget than any other stage of the purchase funnel. But can that assumption result in a missed opportunity to invest in a potentially more impactful channel?

We spoke to Hotel Heroes Blessy Townes, Vice President & Head of Digital at Discovery Hospitality, and Pelayo Pando, eCommerce Business Development & Market Strategy Director at NH Hotel Group about the most common budgeting mistakes they’ve encountered, and what best practices your hotel can implement when building an effective attribution model.

What are hoteliers getting wrong with conversion attribution?

Pelayo: The key is to define a correct attribution model that rewards the most impactful touchpoints of the customer journey. Hotels tend to allocate all credit to the last touchpoint. Think of it as a soccer game, where all the praise goes to strikers. But without the goalkeepers, defenders and midfielders you cannot win the match! In the hotel industry, the game is even trickier because we have to play in two very different fields at the same time: desktop and mobile. Understanding the connection between the two is key for building an efficient marketing budget investment strategy.

Blessy: One of the most common mistakes around conversion attribution is the outdated belief that the customer journey ends at the booking. In reality, a user goes through several stages in their journey to purchase, including inspiration, research, planning, booking, traveling and post-traveling. Hoteliers need to remember that conversion is not always the main goal of this journey. Instead, they need to focus on creating a meaningful relationship with a customer on every stage of their stay.

There is also a popular myth that a typical conversion window is around ninety days. However, the rewards of a pay-per-click model can be instantaneous, while SEO takes longer time to show results. Different models and channels must all be carefully considered – while one may be performing extremely well (especially if it’s based on first- or last-click attribution), it doesn’t mean you can remove other channels from your marketing mix.

There are many touchpoints in a traveller’s booking journey – how do you know that you’re investing your marketing budget into the right one?

Blessy: While search engines are a crucial touchpoint and SEO can drive free traffic, it can take time to rank high on the likes of Google. At Discovery, we first focused our advertising budget on the lower parts of the sales funnel – in this case, the planning and booking stages. Achieving excellent ROI (not ROAS) then enabled us to scale up and increase our presence in the earlier stages of the customer journey.

We also tried retargeting and immediately saw our conversions skyrocketing; artificial intelligence and machine learning then helped us sharpen our targeting capabilities even further.
With our market being 80% local and 20% foreign, we decided to concentrate our limited budget on the latter. With the help of a partner who can help us reach overseas markets, our year-to-date direct booking has grown by 50%, compared to a growth of 20% on third-party channels.

Pelayo: At NH, we use a tailor-made attribution model based on data-driven statistical models. Based on our algorithms, we are able to determine the importance of different touchpoints and invest more in those that are having the most influence on the decision of the customer. We’ve invested a lot of time into creating these models as the impact of each touchpoint can vary over time. Hotels should be continuously assessing their guests’ booking journeys, and adjusting their budget accordingly.

How do you build an ideal attribution strategy?

Blessy: There’s no single perfect attribution strategy for hotels. To drive sustainable long-term growth, marketers have to marry science and creativity to create a model that’s relevant to their business in terms of a number of factors, such as: market sources, geolocation, customer journey, media consumption, distribution channels, booking channels, booking lead time and conversion windows. Most importantly, it has to be tied to their business objectives. Remember that the ultimate goal of having an attribution strategy is to generate meaningful insights and make actionable decisions.

Pelayo: I agree – there is no ideal model! If we were to apply NH’s attribution strategy to a different hotel chain, the results wouldn’t be the same. To create the right strategy for your hotel, you have to define clear business objectives. For example, do you want to maximize revenues, margin, ADR or occupancy? Your chosen objectives will affect your attribution strategy. Last but not least, it is important to keep in mind that building a plan for an independent hotel or a small hotel chain is not the same as for large hotel groups. Before anything else, make sure that this model works for you.

How can hotels create a holistic view of all factors affecting conversion on a customer’s path to purchase?

Blessy: Having an omnichannel view of your customer is ideal. Create customer personas based on your target markets and relevant segments, evaluate an entire consumer journey and identify all touchpoints needed to make a meaningful connection with each persona to assist conversion.

Pelayo: I’d like to add that there is no magical solution that will work for everybody. To build a data-driven model that works for your hotel, you need to have in-depth knowledge of your product, targeted customer groups and the performance of your partners.

What are the dangers of having siloed acquisition and conversion tools when working with tech partners?

Blessy: All channels should work together on the path to purchase. There is a danger of concentrating too much of your marketing budget only on the top-performing channels. The danger is to drop some channels only because they are not scoring high in our attribution model. As Karen Sauder, Vice President of Google, mentioned in a recent blog post, “marketers need to look at insights across the entire consumer journey to get a picture of what’s working — and what’s not”

Pelayo: The main risk is definitely investing the money in the wrong channel. There are channels with very good efficiency but are hardly scalable, so the incremental investment is done at a very high incremental cost. You can also miss out on understanding how investing in one channel impacts the others, and risk duplicating efforts and investing more than is needed.

Another big danger is to overlook the relationship between different devices. You might get an idea that investing in desktop is much more efficient, but neglecting mobile these days means you are potentially harming your customer acquisition capabilities and your mid-term profitability.

Can A/B testing be used to test the impact of various touchpoints on website conversions?

Pelayo: A classic A/B test with random audiences is a technological challenge. In order to do it properly the level of integration in the tools, data processing capabilities and knowledge has to be superb to be able to take the right conclusions. Rather than this, we rely more on testing based on segmented audiences and machine learning algorithms that keep your attribution updated with the continuous changes of the market dynamics and customer needs.

Can you outline the conversion attribution strategy at your organization?

Blessy: At Discovery Hospitality, we believe that convenience drives loyalty. Guests choose us because of the seamless website experience and the availability of direct channels to process their booking. While our year-to-date revenue has grown 73% compared to last year, over 65% of our direct bookings are completed outside of our booking engine. As a workaround, booking engine conversions are monitored and analyzed, including proxy metrics such as Click to Call, inquiries, etc., and overall ad spend is reported and justified with ROI.

While our channels are viewed and optimized individually, we think it’s crucial to see them working together on the path to purchase.

Pelayo: At NH Hotels, we are in the process of solving this conversion attribution puzzle with cutting-edge technology and a team of experts. We are trying to connect all these pieces to determine where the key touchpoints are. That’s how we find out where to invest our marketing dollars to generate the highest value in the short and the mid/long term. We’re also trying to sort the cross-device attribution issues. This is a big challenge, but we are certain that our efforts will pay off!

The current and future growth of our direct channel is driven by correct marketing investments and attribution based on data-driven decisions.

Want to learn more from Blessy and Pelayo? Submit your question for the Hotel Heroes panel and see it featured in this month’s edition of Ask the Hotel Heroes article.

Alisa Voitika is Brand and Content Manager at Triptease.

The post Solving the Puzzle of Conversion Attribution appeared first on .

Jan was asked about his views on effective metasearch management, the growth of Google, and some classic meta mistakes hotels make.

How valuable is metasearch to Deutsche Hospitality?

Its value is very high. At Deutsche Hospitality, we see that metasearch conversion rates are among the highest of our channels. Today, meta is one of the most effective online marketing mechanisms for generating direct bookings.

With that in mind, how much of their budget should hotels allocate to metasearch?

Practically, there should be no limit to the absolute value of your budget. More importantly, you should continue to spend it as long as you generate a satisfactory ROAS. Or, the inverse of that, the Cost of Sale (COS). For example, if a COS of anything below 14% is acceptable for your hotel, you should spend as much budget as you can on metasearch without exceeding this prohibitive level.

What’s more effective: managing metasearch bids in-house or using a partner?

There are some positives to managing meta auctions in-house. For example, you could respond quicker to rapidly-changing bids than a traditional agency that normally does weekly or monthly bid adjustments. Having knowledge about the meta set-up and management can also mean less dependence on agencies in terms of possible cost-saving, given that your personnel costs are lower than the agency fees.

To be successful on meta, you need the right talent – and it is hard to find. Metasearch management done correctly can also be extremely time-consuming. This time could be invested elsewhere with higher returns, so you need to calculate the opportunity cost of having a meta manager in your hotel vs using a partner’s services.

For hoteliers, the appeal of working with tech partners is that they can ‘set it and forget it’. Of course, it can be easier to keep an eye on your hotel’s results on metasearch without having to go through the nuts and bolts of bid management.

What is the impact of a passive approach to meta bidding (no participation)?

It’s simple: not participating in meta auctions means missing out on direct bookings. Even if bidding can be pricey, meta-allocated bookings can still cost you less than bookings through OTAs.

A passive approach is equal to leaving money on the table, which OTAs will grab.

Is Google the right metasearch channel for everyone?

I believe that Google will continue to dominate the market. So, yes, right now it is the right distribution channel for every hotel – but only under the condition that Google is the dominant search engine in your hotel’s respective region.

But don’t forget about local metasearch sites – if they are popular amongst your guests, you should be adding them to your distribution mix. The distribution budget should then be allocated based on the ROAS generated on these sites.

How much budget should hotels allocate to metasearch?

Practically, there should be no limit to the absolute value of your budget. More importantly, you should continue to spend it as long as you generate a satisfactory ROAS. Or, the inverse of that, the Cost of Sale (COS). For example, if a COS of anything below 14% is acceptable for your hotel, you should spend as much budget as you can on metasearch without exceeding this prohibitive level.

How do you measure success on meta?

At Deutsche Hospitality, we apply the metrics of ROAS/COS to each meta channel and see whether it fits into the overall COS for any particular hotel’s direct booking revenue.

What are the biggest meta mistakes a hotel can make?

Not having your rates in check! Without rate parity, you better stay away from metasearch. Also, I see some hotels being passive at managing their bids on metasearch, therefore not fully exploiting their revenue potential for this number-one distribution channel or wasting money on clicks that cannot convert!

To find out more about how to build a bidding strategy that marries high volume with high return, join Jan for a webinar on August 28 at 4pm BST. Click here to learn more and to register.

Alisa Voitika is Brand and Content Manager at Triptease.

The post “Without Rate Parity, You Better Stay Away from Metasearch!” A Discussion with Jan Sammeck of Deutsche Hospitality appeared first on .