Hotels and guesthouses
Every booking that arrives through Booking.com costs you 15-20%. The work is getting some of those people to find you and book direct instead.
The problem isn't visibility, it's who captures it
Your hotel already shows up in Google, but on a portal's listing, not yours. The pattern is almost always the same: a traveller discovers the hotel on a portal, then searches the hotel's name to see the official site, and decides there. If that brand search lands on a slow site with weak photography and no visible rate, they go back to the portal and you pay commission on a guest who was already yours.
Three markets, three ways of searching and booking
German guests book months ahead, compare listings in detail and read the terms. British guests decide later and look at price and location. The domestic market arrives on a long weekend and searches for immediate availability. One page in three languages doesn't cover that. It needs different content, different campaign windows and different messages per market.
What we move first
The Google Business Profile and the photography, because that's what most people see and it's the fastest thing to fix. Then the room pages, reorganised around what people actually search for: "hotel with private pool in [area]", not "Deluxe Suite". And honest rate parity with a real reason to book direct, even if it's breakfast or a late checkout.
Common questions
Can you reduce my dependence on Booking.com?
Reduce it, yes. Eliminate it, almost never, and anyone promising otherwise doesn't know this sector. The realistic goal is moving direct bookings from the usual 10-15% to around 30-35%, which for a small hotel is the difference between a tight year and a good one.
Will you work with the booking engine I already have?
Yes. We integrate whatever you use, as long as it can be embedded or linked with tracking. If yours breaks the mobile experience we'll tell you, because that's usually where the bookings are lost.
What if I'm a small eight-room guesthouse?
That's where this work pays best. With few rooms you aren't competing on volume but on filling the season well, and niche German-language search plus reviews carry enormous weight there.
Keep reading
- Search engine optimisationRanking first on Google isn't luck and it isn't a bigger budget. It's architecture, content and patience, applied in the language each customer is actually searching in.
- Web design and developmentA website isn't a brochure. It's the salesperson that works while you sleep, and most of the ones we audit are built as though nobody would ever open them on a phone.
- Brand identityTwo hotels with the same pool at the same price don't sell the same way. The difference is how the name feels before anyone looks at the rooms.
- Google Business Profile and local searchIf your customers come to a physical door, the map pack above the search results matters more than everything below it, and it's decided by three things most businesses ignore.
- Conversion rate optimisationDoubling your traffic is slow and expensive. Doubling the proportion of it that buys is often a fortnight's work, and nobody does it first.