Smart Hotels are becoming their own “OTA”s with more traffic than booking.com, without paying commissions

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Google Hotel Finder has been around for a number of years mainly as an experiment, but over the last few months Google has started displaying Google Hotel results aggressively in SERPs (search engine result pages) in mainland Europe, making it important that your hotel is listed.

Google Hotel Finder is designed to be a one-stop-shop for accommodation planning. It is designed to display relevant information from many hotels that fit your search criteria, and then give you reservation options. I’ll get into further details after I explain how to get your hotel listed.

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How to List Your Hotel with Hotel Finder

Similar to how Google scans other websites to find information to display, Google Hotel Finder gathers hotel information from a variety of places. Here is what you need to do to get listed.

Step One – Create a Google Local Page
I am sure most of you have one already, but just in case you do not, Google gets a hotel’s marketing content, including descriptions, photos, videos and more, from your property’s Google Local listing. Thus, before you get listed, you need to create a Google Local profile. It is very easy to do, and you can get a basic one set up in just a few minutes.

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Step Two – Connect Your Booking Engine or channel manager to Google HPA
Google populates Google Hotel Finder with up-to-date information about your hotel’s inventory availability by tapping into OTA´s, your booking engine or channel manager. If your current supplier cannot provide you with connectivity to Google, then their are others that can. Contact us to help you achieve this.  We advise that you engage with an expert agency to help manage your setup and google campaigns as it is important that you a maximizing your ROI in the right areas with the best campaigns.  You can though get members of your team trained with some of the many courses currently available to enable you to manage this in-house.  Bear in mind, that if you are not connected and a future guest is looking to reserve a room in the area where your hotel or resort is located, Google HPA will show pricing for your hotel via a OTA that sells you, so it will be a missed opportunity to sell directly and save on commission payments!

Step Three – Update Your Content and incentivize customer reviews
Now that you have your Google Local listing set up and you’re connected to Google, you need to keep your hotel’s information updated.  Google Hotel Finder will keep your listing’s availability and rates up-to-date automatically.  To edit your listing’s marketing content, such as hotel descriptions, photos, addresses and so on, log-in to your Google Local page and make any changes you wish. These changes will be reflected on Google Hotel Finder eventually. It is also important to increase the reviews you receive from guests on google as this will help with provide your Hotel or Resort with increased visibility that will help you stand out from the crowd!

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Why Should You Bother?
Over the last few months, Google incorporated Hotel Finder listings into standard search queries. Google ‘madrid hotels’ and you find a Hotel Finder search box at the top of the list. This is valuable real estate in the SERP Google could be using to place more AdWords ads. It is clear that guests are starting to adopt Hotel Finder, so by having a prominent listing with many guest reviews will be important to stand out among the crowd for local queries.

If you need help in getting your hotel or Resort connected to Google, get in touch with us info@hotelient.net and we will get you up and running.

About the author

John Kearney has over 20 years of Hotel Sales and General Hotel Management experience working for both Independent 4 & 5* Hotels & Resorts as well as with Intercontinental (IHG) and Radisson SAS for Hotels based in London as well as across Spain.

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