How To Increase Bookings with Online Advertising
Filed Under (Booking Engines, Business Intelligence, How To, Online Marketing) by Luke M. Davis on November-9-2008

If you list your hotel, hostel, or bed and breakfast with Instant World Booking, or other online booking agencies, here is some advice for maximizing your reservation potential:

 

1)  Ensure your listing is up to date and accurate.  Include as much information as possible, not only about your property, but also about local attractions, restaurants, etc.

 

2)  Make sure to spell-check your listing.  Incorrect spelling signals to guests that the property is not professionally maintained.

 

3)  Add photos.  Listings with photos gain at least 4x more traffic than those without photos.  Make sure your photos are large and complement your property and location.

 

4)  Add a complete calendar of availability.  Your calendar is important, since guests prefer instant booking over online requests.  Make sure you have complete availability online, and at least 6-9 months of availability.

 

5)  Include an accurate street address on your listing, as well as local directions.  Guests will not book properties that they can’t easily find.

 

6)  Use Instant World Booking’s low-cost options for accepting reservations on YOUR OWN website.

Remember, it can take several weeks to several months for Google and other leading search engines to effectively index your page on our network of sites.  Instant World Booking has proven to be very successful in gaining top search engine rankings for its listed lodging partners.  One last reason it is very important to use the instant booking method is that we use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to market your property on Google and other sites.  Effectively use of a PPC campaign can cost you hundreds of US dollars.  However, for our partners who use instant booking, we advertise your property in PPC campaigns for free.

 

One last note, persistence and patience is the key to success.  Online marketing is “collective”.  This means it is more effective to advertise your property on 2 services than 1.  Persistent online presence is necessary to achieve online name (brand) recognition, and to gain higher search rankings for pages containing your property’s name.  Advertising with Instant World Booking is an extremely valuable, and free, method of increasing your online presence.

 

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Comments
Poets Corner Olomouc on November 9th, 2008 at 2:39 pm #

Good list of basic suggestions.

I’m curious about the PPC campaigns though-the ads I’ve seen just seem to target the most popular hostels in the biggest cities; the ones that will fill up anyway. So the advertisers are just scrambling for a share of that hostel’s potential commission income, rather than actaully bringing in any extra bookings…grabbing a bigger share of the pie rather than increasing the overall size of it, one might say.

How does Instant World Booking decide which of their partner hostels will have the benefit of PPC advertising and which will miss out?

Luke M. Davis on November 9th, 2008 at 4:34 pm #

Thanks for this excellent question. Instant World Booking is an advocate for the smaller and lesser known hostels and hotels. We believe that all properties have the potential for satisfying guests, and we don’t just emphasize the well-known ones. Instant World Booking therefore uses PPC campaigns to advertise all partner hostels and hotels that use our instant booking service. As long as a hostel maintains a calendar of availability for instant online booking, Instant World Booking reviews all listings and periodically adds pay-per-click campaigns for these properties. It may take anywhere from 1 to 3 months for a listing to be reviewed for inclusion in this program. It does not matter how many reservations the property has generated. As mentioned, this advertising comes at no cost to the partner, and therefore adds extraordinary value.

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