GOOGLE HOTEL ADS: NEW WAYS TO DRIVE HOTEL BOOKINGS AND REACH GUESTS

Abstract

Think about the last time you booked a hotel. Did you go directly to the hotel website? Have you visited a local travel agency? Or did you went to Google and did a search for accommodation in the destination you want to travel to. Today, thanks to the mass and availability of the Internet and the information it offers, Google is very often the first place where travelers start the hotel reservation process. Millions of potential travelers around the world choose and book their hotel through the Google search engine. That's why the increase in the tourism sector, especially in online bookings, has not gone unnoticed by Google, introducing its new Hotel Finder platform, in the search engine for hotels called Google Hotel Ads or Google Hotel Ads Commission Program. In this way, Google is taking a huge step to face platforms like Booking or Trip Advisor, enabling direct booking from the search engine itself. Furthermore, the pay-per-click system is moving towards a cost-per-click or cost-per-purchase bidding strategy, paying only when a room reservation is made. Google Hotel Ads offers the ability to display a hotel ad or accommodation to travelers at the exact moment they are looking for a hotel, meaning the hotel will only pay when the traveler clicks on the ad or books a room. In addition, the traveler can book the accommodation directly from the hotel website, which will allow the hotels to constantly control the sales process. Having already pointed out several of the obvious advantages of this hotel meta-search engine Google Hotel Ads, further work will focus on a complete analysis of this advertising platform in terms of benefits for hotel accommodation facilities. At the beginning, an overview of the size of online bookings will be given to further understand the importance of Google Hotel Ads in the tourism promotion market. Furthermore, it will be discussed how Google Hotel Ads functions and works when a certain potential traveler wants to access and search for information about accommodation capacity in a selected tourist destination, but also what the hotel should do, considering how it should and can place and bid ads. The paper further discusses why hotels should use Google Hotel Ads, presenting numerous advantages, but also how they can actually improve ad reach with increasingly obvious competition while ensuring a good return on investment.