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If you are in the hotel industry, you may be familiar with metasearch engines. They are pretty much an unavoidable part of the hotel industry, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways in which you can take advantage of them. Today in the Southeast International Hotel Brokers blog, we’ll dive deeper into what metasearch engines are and what you can do to make them work for you.

What are Metasearch Engines?

Metasearch engines are search engines that automatically display hotel rates in a location when you search for hotels in that region. So, if you searched ‘hotels in NYC’ it would pop up with some links to OTAs, but it would also show you several rates on their own at the top of the page.

This is extremely convenient for users because they can quickly look at different rates without having to go to another website. These engines are used almost as often as OTAs (online travel agencies), and the commissions you pay on them are much lower than OTAs. In short, you can’t afford to be missing out on the potential bookings you could be getting from metasearch engines.

How to Take Advantage of Them

Metasearch engines, like Google and TripAdvisor, use a CPC (cost-per-click) model instead of the CPA (cost-per-acquisition) model that OTAs use. What this means is that every time someone clicks on your hotel in the metasearch engine you’ll be charged, whether they book or not.

This sounds less beneficial than the CPA model, but the CPC rate is much lower than the CPA rate. In the hotel industry, chances are that, if they are clicking on the rate they are already interested in booking. This alone works in your favor. From there, the best way to take advantage of these metasearch engines is by creating a robust bidding strategy.

In order to appear in these metasearch engine results, you need to bid on space. You should also target as many metasearch channels as your budget will allow. Over time, you will have actionable conversion data that will allow you to develop your strategy further. This will allow you to better decide what times of day and days of the week are the best to bid.

Of course, this does not guarantee that metasearch will work for you. You need to stay on top of the data and make sure your digital marketing team evolves their strategy if you want to see extra revenue from your metasearch engine efforts. One thing is for certain, metasearch engines are valuable and are getting better. It is a good idea to add them to your marketing plan now, rather than later.

Choose Southeast International Hotel Brokers

Buying or selling a hotel can be an overwhelming process, but Southeast International Hotel Brokers can help to make it easy. Our hospitality brokers have the resources and knowledge to help walk you through everything. Contact us today for more information and to speak with a member of the hospitality brokers team. We look forward to working with you!