That’s why we have created this comprehensive Digital Marketing Guide for Hoteliers, a one-stop shop for everything you need to know. With expert insights, this guide is built to help you take control of your online presence, attract more direct bookings, and create a consistent guest experience from digital touchpoint to check-out.
Let’s examine the key pillars of a successful hotel digital marketing strategy, starting with how you present yourself on social media.
Social Media
Social media is becoming the number one place potential guests go to discover and evaluate properties. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok allow you to showcase not just your rooms and amenities but also your hotel’s personality, service, and guest experiences in real time.
The top five tips to a successful social media strategy are to tell your story, post quality content, be authentic, perfect your specs and formatting, and stay consistent. Create a monthly calendar to stay ahead and ensure you never miss a post.
Social media is also a powerful tool for reputation building and storytelling. When done right, it builds trust, drives bookings, and turns followers into loyal guests. For a more in-depth look at social media for hotels, check out our complete guide.
Reputation Management
Guest reviews are the hospitality industry’s digital word-of-mouth. No matter what avenue a traveler is booking through, they check your reviews before clicking “book.”
Reputation management starts with timely, professional responses to every review, positive or negative. A thoughtful response shows future guests that you care about feedback and are committed to excellent service. Negative reviews are opportunities to demonstrate transparency and improvement; positive ones are moments to express gratitude and reinforce your hotel’s key selling points.
But it doesn’t stop at responses. Use your reviews as a roadmap. Are guests consistently mentioning the pool, your location, or friendly staff? Spotlight those positives in your marketing strategy. Are there recurring complaints about Wi-Fi connectivity or noise? That’s your cue to dig deeper and resolve internal issues. Check out our complete guide for a more in-depth look at responding to hotel reviews.
Public Relations
While digital ads are great for targeted exposure, public relations brings organic credibility that money can’t buy. Effective PR in hospitality means telling compelling stories that make journalists, bloggers, influencers, and ultimately potential guests take notice.
Between press releases about renovations, grand openings, or influencer collaborations, PR helps position your property as a destination worth talking about. It can also involve community involvement and thought leadership, like having your GM speak on local tourism trends or your chef featured in a regional food magazine.
Be proactive about sharing newsworthy updates and fostering beneficial media relationships. And don’t underestimate the power of hyper-local PR. Being featured in a local digital outlet can have as much impact as national coverage, especially when it drives direct bookings from your surrounding region.
Email Marketing
While newer channels get all the hype, email marketing continues to be one of the most cost-effective and conversion-rich tools in your digital toolkit. Why? Because it allows you to speak directly to your most interested audience: past guests and prospective travelers who already know you.
Create real value email campaigns: special offers, local travel tips, seasonal packages, or exclusive insider deals. Segment your audience for even better results. A returning guest may appreciate a loyalty discount, while a new subscriber might need an introductory look at your amenities.
Design matters too. Keep emails mobile-friendly, visually appealing, and easy to navigate with strong calls to action. When used correctly, email marketing builds anticipation, re-engages past guests, and boosts direct revenue, without giving up a commission to third-party sites.
SEO
In the travel and hospitality industry, SEO usually impacts two areas: the standard ten blue links and the local three-packs.
It would be ideal for a hotel to rank among the top 10 blue links, especially on the first search engine results page (SERP). This could be challenging because Google typically prioritizes articles that aggregate information for search results, such as “hotels in Orlando.” This preference aligns better with how users search for information.
Compared to individual hotels, aggregator sites like OTAs and Tripadvisor are preferable candidates to rank. Besides, those aggregator sites usually have way better domain authorities and backlink profiles than individual properties, which makes it harder for the latter to compete. Individual hotels or brands may strategically optimize to rank for less competitive, upper funnel queries or questions like “Things to do in Orlando.” It can slowly but surely build up an online presence and, more importantly, credibility in Google’s eyes, which will benefit the site’s long-term SEO endeavors.
On the local SEO side, Google shows the “local three pack” snippets for queries with local intent, such as “hotels in Orlando” or “hotels near me.” Maintaining a strong Google Business Profile (GBP) and having a solid review strategy are still among the top ranking signals within a hotel’s control.
Google Hotels (Metasearch)
The “local three pack” snippet links to Google Hotels, Google’s robust metasearch engine. With 94% of travelers using it when booking their accommodation, metasearch is one of the significant ways hotels send traffic to their websites to promote direct revenue.
Hotels don’t need to be connected to Google Hotels to qualify for appearing in the local 3-Pack. Nonetheless, Google Hotels remain a critical component of a hotel’s multi-channel distribution strategy, serving as a central metasearch portal that drives booking intent, especially on the direct side.
The online hotel booking industry has several prominent metasearch players, including Google Hotels, Tripadvisor, Trivago, and Kayak. Google Hotels dominates the hotel metasearch vertical with a staggering market share estimated between 64% and 80% (or nearly 85% share in 2022, according to Mirai).
Hotels need to be working with a third-party connectivity provider to get their ARI (Availability, Rates, and Inventory) synced to Google Hotels. This allows Google to pull real-time rates, availability, and booking links. After that, hotels can take advantage of the Free Booking Link (FBL). FBL, a feature launched in March 2021, lets hotels list their direct booking option on Google Hotels without paying for clicks or commissions. It appears alongside OTA prices, allowing travelers to book directly on the hotel’s website, commission-free.
Google Hotel Ads
Hotels also have the option to leverage metasearch ads on Google Hotels to improve visibility and drive more direct bookings. The program is called Google Hotel Ads (GHA).
GHA is a part of the larger Google Ads ecosystem, specifically designed for the hospitality industry. These ads appear in various Google platforms, including Google Search, Google Travel, and Google Maps, providing broad visibility to potential guests.
GHA mainly operates on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, where hotels are charged when users click on their ad. The bidding and ranking system determines the position of the hotel’s ad in the search results. Factors such as bid amount, ad quality, and landing page experience influence the ad’s visibility and performance.
Research revealed that while GHA may cannibalize a share of FBL bookings, overall, it could help increase total bookings and revenue because of a “billboard effect,” where the ads raise awareness and influence travelers.
Paid Search
According to Mirai’s data from 2014 to 2019, hotel digital marketing saw a clear shift of ad budgets from “traditional” online media like Google Ads to metasearch ads. This trend aligned with Google’s strategic push of its metasearch arm, Google Hotels.
That said, travel is a unique industry in which traditional Google Ads, or search ads, are not working as well as they did 10 years ago. The discovery phase of the traveler’s journey is very complicated and requires a ‘multimodal’ way of displaying information. Fewer travelers nowadays would click text search ads to book a hotel after searching “Hotels in ___.”
Hotel marketers debate that there could be one exception: the branded, local campaign for a hotel. In other words, it could still make sense for a hotel to launch a search campaign that only bids for branded keywords and only targets local travelers in the city or DMA where the hotel is located.
Another thing to remember is that the cost per click has been increasing significantly in the past decade. This applies to both traditional search ads and Google Hotel Ads. In the meantime, paid search may not drive booking intent as “bottom-funneled” as before, especially since 2024 when Google launched AI Overview (AIO).
AI
AI-powered search, like SearchGPT and Perplexity, is disruptive to traditional search because it is more intuitive and efficient in spitting out exactly what customers want. The search experience is more relevant, holistic, timely, and conversational. As a result, it is eroding Google’s search market share. On the other hand, Google has been catching up, as marked by the launch of AIO in May 2024. It’s been noticed that the AIO section is pushing the organic 10 blue links further down the page and also significantly reducing the visibility of paid ads. Approximately 60% of Google searches never result in a single click.
This means that the effectiveness and efficiency of SEM and SEO may need to be reevaluated in the AI age, especially if they were heavily leaning on Google for digital marketing. On the paid search side, it has been teased in the industry that Google’s dominant PPC model is becoming more of a CPM based model. If yes, it would call for a “repricing” of Google’s ad inventories – it may already be happening. Also, moving forward, SEO could go more long-tail, short-lived, and further down in the conversion funnel because AI-generated content can primarily fulfill the demand for generic content with little purchase intent in the upper funnels.
With AI synthesizing information from the whole web, marketers would also want to optimize their presence and visibility on multiple platforms, not merely their websites.
OTA
OTAs emerged from the ashes of the dot-com bubble as their business model proved valid and sustainable. Their growth accelerated further after 9/11 and 2008 as hotels turned to OTAs during uncertain times for risk and cash flow management, reaping the benefits of “free” marketing without upfront spending.
Hotels, as high-asset investments, naturally lean toward opening up more inventory to OTAs to save on overhead in order to survive first in a macro environment with uncertainty or even headwinds. In 2025 and the foreseeable future, with tighter liquidity and more expensive capital, OTAs provide a solid cushion to scale with a controlled cash flow.
OTAs can also help hotels reach a specific psychological segment of travelers that they can’t reach from their direct channels. This segment of travelers tends to be loyal to the OTA brands and prioritize an intuitive, convenient, and smooth end-to-end “pipe” experience over price and other factors, just like Amazon shoppers. For this “OTA-minded” segment, OTAs can be a great referral or acquisition channel with reasonable CAC (customer acquisition costs). Hotels should strategically convert those guests into long-term repeat customers who book direct by building a deeper relationship with top-notch in-stay and post-stay “room delivery” services.
The old dichotomy of “direct vs. OTA” gives way to a more strategic and nuanced approach in which both channels play a role in a comprehensive distribution strategy.
Wrap-Up
Digital marketing moves fast, but with the right strategy, your hotel can stay ahead of the curve and at the top of travelers’ minds. By investing time and resources into your online presence across social media, reputation management, SEO, AI, ads, and everything in between, you’re setting your property up for long-term success.
Whether refining your current approach or building a strategy from the ground up, this guide is your blueprint for modern hospitality marketing. Save it, share it with your team, and return to it often.
Your guests are already online; make sure your hotel meets them with a purpose.