Hotel Metasearch Engine Marketing

Metasearch is a hot trend in hotels digital marketing and their popularity is growing on continuously. Metasearch engines are winning the market shares from traditional online travel agencies such as Booking.com and Hotels.com. According to the data this trend is not going to change. If you want to invest your marketing budget smartly it's a good idea to consider metasearch marketing.

What is a metasearch engine?

A metasearch engine is a search tool that sends user requests to several other search engines and aggregates the results into a single list. For a traveller, this might mean they’ll be shown a list of websites to compare hotel prices, availability and terms in real-time. A traveller can decide the best option to complete the reservation without the need to visit each site individually.

Why is meta searches important for hotels

Metasearch engines represent a huge opportunity for hotels – the easier travelers can find and book your hotel the better – but also a challenge. In a way, metasearch combines the digital marketing and distribution efforts of a hotel. Metasearch presents a booking channel and an environment to advertise your hotel. This is part of the advantage, since potential guests can discover and book you almost simultaneously, meaning there’s a bigger chance of impulse purchases and less chance of abandoned bookings. Given its popularity among travelers thanks to a comparative rate model, hotels should seriously consider investing some marketing budget in a metasearch engine, or look for ways to optimize their visibility and efficiency if they’re already engaging in this area. There are a few major players in the metasearch world and not all of them use exactly the same model, so it’s important you have a clear understanding of what is the best for your hotel or hotelchain.

Here are some essential things your hotel needs to know about this metasearch:

Metasearch is growing strongly, dominating over traditional ads.
There are a handful of key metasearch engines, such as Google Hotels, TripAdvisor, Trivago and Kayak. It’s recommended to focus on the key metasearch engines in the beginning.
Sites like TripAdvisor can offer instant booking, meaning the traveler can stay on the same screen to complete their booking, providing a simpler and more seamless experience. Google used to have this option as well but Book on Google was closed recently.
Metasearch advertising is largely based on a pay-per-click model, meaning the hotel will only pay for their advertisement when someone clicks on it. CPA model is nowadays getting more and more popular. In CPA-model Hotel’s only pay for the completed reservation. (CPA= Cost Per Acquisition).
Some models include pay-per-impression, which are based around charging a predetermined fee for a certain amount of impressions.
Metasearch creates interesting opportunities for hotels because it gives them better chances to compete against OTA’s and secure more direct bookings.
Metasearch is a trending market, with smaller sites being bought by larger ones to create more marketing power. Besides the big metasearch engines, there are a lot of smaller ones that can work really well on some specific regions such as WeGo on Asian market.
It’s important to use the right tools, like CRS’s, PMS’s, Booking Engines, and Channel Managers. This is because updating prices, terms and availability on each metasearch engine manually becomes too complicated and too much time taking.
Metasearch marketing without the working booking engine is not recommended<