WHY YOUR HOTEL NEEDS A BRANDED BOOKING ENGINE DOMAIN

Your hotel needs a branded booking engine domain. A branded boking engine domain is often referred to as a private label domain, or a vanity domain. For a hotel it would mean that when a guest connects to the booking engine it does this through a domain such as reservations.hoteldomain.com.

The importance of this should not be underestimated. Apart from the fact that it ensures guests are comfortable handing over their credit card details, knowing that the hotel domain is associated with the transaction, it also has some unique benefits regarding online channel attribution.

Since Apple launched its update to IOS 13.5 and Intelligent Tracking Protection, browsers as well as software providers, and lastly the population at large, have discovered that they are being tracked online. The response has come in the form of technical measures that make tracking, especially digital campaign tracking, much more difficult. As a result, what used to be a clear line of sight between a campaign and the conversion, is now much opaquer.

At the end of this year Google will stop setting 3rd party cookies in Chrome, with many of the other browsers and companies already blocking them. In practical terms, unless your hotel is using a service like Veribooking, you will only be seeing a fraction of narrative regarding campaign performance.

If your campaigns are not getting the data fed back in a privacy friendly way, your campaign performance suffers. Neither of the advertising platforms are able to provide a complete picture about where bookings are taking place. That’s because their own native tracking technologies are unable to capture the whole conversion journey.

That is why our performance marketing service, Veribooking, provides an unparalleled view of where a hotel’s online demand is. It combines the latest in tracking technology and privacy first conversion tracking, leading to massively improved campaign performance and bookings direct to your hotel.

REMARKETING AND WHY IT DOESN’T WORK FOR YOUR HOTEL

If there is one thing, you can be sure of regarding the online guest, is that they shop around. At Veribooking we have seen typical guest conversion journeys of up to 25 independent visits to a hotel website before booking.

In other words, the hotel booking journey is and always has been a multi-touch experience. It is not a click-to-buy process of an Amazon checkout.

If the remarketing service being used by your hotel sees a tracking pixel being installed on all the pages of your website, and then shows advertising to people when they leave (to get them to book direct), it stands to reason that a large proportion of those visitors would have booked irrespective of whether they saw the advertisement or not, it’s simply the nature of the hospitality booking journey.

Therefore, a remarketing service that tags every visitor to your hotel website, is most likely going to be capturing bookings that would have happened anyway.
If your hotel is being charged a performance fee for these bookings, you need to be really sure that the bookings are actually added by the service, and not simply being appropriated by the service.

We often see hotels losing out in the technical documentation provided by these performance services, where the difference between a view-through conversion vs a click-through conversion can lead to significant increases in the appropriation of bookings that would have arrived naturally.

By contract Veribooking offers hotels a privacy safe first party digital revenue management service. We don’t offer display remarketing, because we know it doesn’t work. We would be quite happy to show how these services are appropriating your hotel’s direct bookings and selling them back to you with their commission on top, and how our service works differently.

We scale and optimise campaigns for Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Google Hotel Ads using over 15 years of expertise working with luxury hotels.
Get in touch and let us explain how much better our service is, and how much less it will cost your hotel, while giving you an unparallelled view of your hotels online demand and how to take advantage of it.