For anyone trying to establish any sort of presence online, the importance of Google cannot be denied.  Few travelers now plan their trip without consulting the global search giant, so where you are positioned, and how you are represented has become a critical success factors for anyone in the travel sector.  Recent Google initiatives focused on travel mean that the company will become even more important in the future.  Is this good or bad for hotels and other travel suppliers?

Search, be it organic or pay-per-click, is currently dominated by the global OTAs.  Such companies, being in effect ecommerce pure players, have leveraged their extensive expertise to insure that their site structure and focused content helps them to appear very prominently in natural search results.  Similarly OTAs such as Booking.com and Expedia are among Google’s top advertisers worldwide, spending billions of dollars on highly specific, targeted search engine marketing campaigns.

As a result, bidding on (or even attempting to organically optimize on) relatively generic search terms such as ‘hotel’ plus location (e.g. hotel Paris, hotel Lyon) has become impossible for most hotels.  Even targeting highly specific terms such as the hotel’s own name and location has become a challenge as OTAs leverage their extensive expertise, superior technology and deep pockets to reach deeper and deeper into the purchase funnel.

In addition OTAs also make extensive use of affiliates and white label partners, both of which leverage their highly specific focus and content to appear higher in search engine results listings.  Most affiliates tend to target highly specific niches, be they geographic or content focused; engage in their own search engine marketing and thus tend to rank highly whenever a customer searches for that specific niche.  As a result of their specificity, such sites also tend to be good at converting the customer, again driving more business to their OTA back end.

New initiatives such as Google Hotel Finder are (currently at least) are also dominated by the major OTAs.  Hotel Finder, which is deeply integrated with both Google Maps and Google Local, not only allows potential customers to find hotels that match their needs in a highly convenient graphical manner, but also meta-searches price and availability from a variety of different sources, the majority of which today are (and for the foreseeable future, will be) OTA players.

Thus, on practically ever interaction with Google, a hotel’s potential customers are being driven to OTA channels.  It’s time to face it.  Within travel the battle for consumers in the search arena is over and the OTAs have won!  While suppliers may bemoan this face, claiming that it is unfair that third parties are coming between them and their customers, from the latter’s perspective the difference is immaterial.  Consumers are using search engines such as Google to find travel solution, and the simple fact is that OTAs are doing a far better job of providing the content and functionality that answers their questions than travel suppliers.

Why then are OTAs so successful at dominating the search space, particularly Google?  Operating purely in the online space, the majority of OTAs realized long ago that the key to success was driving traffic to their websites, and thus the more successful ones have devoted the time, energy and resources to mastering search.  Hotels, on the other hand, have to date been happy to sit back and let them, avoiding the risk and expense of serious search engine marketing by paying distributors for bookings delivered.

However, with their domination established, OTAs are now beginning to turn the screw, and hotels are waking up to the fact that they need to reexamine their passive strategy.  Given the fragmentation in the industry, and our historical reluctance to cooperate effectively, battle the OTAs for visibility on Google will be very difficult. In fact trying to compete with the OTAs in search is to a large extent today pointless for most hotels – the equivalent of banging your head against the wall.

An alternative strategy is necessary.  One of the key value-added provided by OTAs has now become access to the customer – particularly the customer who is not brand loyal – through the search environment.    In effect what we have done is outsources our customer acquisition to the OTAs.

But this also highlights one of the ways in which hotels can fight back about against the continually growing power of the OTAs – by leveraging our brands, our brand visibility and our loyalty programs not to find customers in the first place but to retain them once they have tested our product.

Smart hotel companies have realized that, rather than trying to constantly battle OTAs, they in fact need to leverage their strengths in finding new customers.   However, once the OTAs has delivered a to booking the hotel property, the chain makes sure that this customer is swamped by the power of the brand, enrolled in the loyalty program, interacted with seamlessly during and after the stay and that this customer makes any subsequent bookings directly.

Hotels can only achieve this if they have strong brands and a consistent customer proposition.  In an era of specialization, perhaps hotels need to focus on what they are good at – providing outstanding customer service – and leave the search engine marketing to the experts?