
Learn basics of hotel marketing, current hospitality challenges, and a sequence of direct and indirect booking tactics, plus digital marketing strategies to promote hotel facilities.
Share this course with your team to align on hundreds of hotel digital marketing tactics and accelerate bookings, while gifting the course and helping team members grow their skills.
Access consulting to implement hotel marketing tactics, including paid search, display, programmatic video, metasearch, and social ads, plus search engine optimization audits, marketing analysis, ab tests, and strategic execution plan.
Explore why hotel marketing matters, using online and offline tactics to boost direct bookings, cut commissions, and maximize occupancy and revenue.
Design a direct-booking landing page with above-the-fold booking engine, hero media, and unique selling points, plus below-the-fold sections for rooms, facilities, and offers.
Implement a sticky booking engine widget that stays above the fold and remains fixed as users scroll, keeping it always visible and boosting conversions on hotel landing pages.
Display recent searches beneath the booking engine widget to boost conversions by recalling cookie-stored search criteria on desktop and mobile.
Arrange album photos to match customer preferences with a two-part layout that shows the first seven photos, starting with the best image, followed by the rest, to engage impatient users.
Prioritize translating your hotel website by using Google Analytics alongside CRC data to identify languages that drive direct bookings, and build a Google Analytics report to guide 12-month translation decisions.
Place the contact us icon beside the telephone on the landing page. Link it to a page with a form, emails, phones, address, map, and social links.
Show a star rating widget above the fold with the average rating from major sites to boost direct bookings and retain users, implemented via a JavaScript snippet in 10–30 minutes.
Present rooms and suites effectively in the below the fold area by showcasing room types with image descriptions, unique selling points, and clear call-to-action buttons to boost engagement and conversions.
Use a room type filter on the landing page to show rooms or suites from a dropdown, preselecting rooms to encourage direct bookings.
Use a per room type pop-up to display photos, descriptions, and amenities without leaving the landing page, guiding visitors toward a direct booking with a prominent call to action.
Add relevant keywords to your hotel description, such as five star hotel in London or luxury hotel in NYC, to improve landing page performance and drive direct bookings.
Recommend showing an interactive map in the hotel landing page content to keep visitors from leaving, maintain focus in the conversion funnel, and boost direct bookings.
Launch an interactive WordPress map showing hotel location with nearby attractions and transit points, in a popup with road, satellite, terrain views, plus skins, markers, shapes, and a store locator.
Show nearby points of interest to highlight your hotel, including attractions, bus stops, and metro stations, with a button to view all nearby attractions that links to the interactive map.
Present popular hotel facilities on your landing page using a slider to showcase restaurants, pools, private beach, and wellness center, guiding users toward direct booking of room nights.
Show guests how to reach the hotel by train, taxi, car rental, or transfer, with tabbed, booking-friendly details on costs and travel times.
Compile guest queries and requests to build an faq on your website and optimize the chat bot to handle questions, by having front desk and reservations staff document every query.
Showcase hotel restaurants and bars on homepage with a tabbed layout, providing descriptions, opening times, a photo slider, and call-to-action buttons linking to the menu, booking engine, or more information.
Showcase your hotel’s meeting and event facilities on the homepage, segment into meetings, weddings, and special events, and include two call-to-action buttons per category: get a quotation and learn more.
Choose a booking engine widget that appears at the first conversion step, showing all room types and rates to let users edit adults, check in/out dates, and stay on page.
Use a booking engine to create promotion codes for special rates targeting corporate groups, weddings, leisure travelers, and offer extra services to boost direct bookings, showing before and after prices.
Present room types early in the funnel with a booking engine that previews top amenities, photos, and rates by room type, plus a hyperlink to full details, enabling easy comparison.
Offer two rate plans per room—non-refundable and free-cancellation—and limit to three self-explanatory options, appealing to leisure and business travelers, deferring breakfast to the next step.
Choose a booking engine that automatically hides unavailable options, optimizes room order by user search criteria, and shows similar available room types.
Learn how to achieve rate parity across OTAs, metasearch, and your hotel website to boost direct bookings, avoid undercutting, and improve marketing performance with parity monitoring tools.
Implement live chat and chatbot on conversion pages to answer questions beyond the booking engine and boost conversion rates up to 30 percent from metasearch, paid search, and email campaigns.
Organize hotel services into categories and prioritize them by popularity using your data, placing top services like airport transfer and breakfast first to boost bookings.
Boost hotel booking conversions by ensuring your booking engine offers multiple payment options, including Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Stripe, with secure, dynamically updated content.
Encourage converters to follow your hotel on social media to gain free, real-customer likes and an engaged, repeat‑business audience; share an amusing promotional video to boost word‑of‑mouth brand awareness.
Trigger an exit pop-up as users attempt to leave the booking engine, offering a 10% discount plus benefits like free breakfast, minibar, early check-in/out, and call-to-action to secure direct bookings.
Enhance data collection across your website and booking engine to gain actionable insights, tracking actions from room interactions to form errors using web analytics and tag management for conversion optimization.
Evaluate a booking engine partner's commitment to conversion rate optimization by testing templates, releasing improvements, and adding features to boost long-term digital marketing performance.
Trigger email campaigns automatically send personalized messages based on user actions, with minimal manual input after setup; examples include reservation confirmations and campaigns like pre-arrival, stay, post-stay, and subscription updates.
Upsell in the confirmation email by offering a 10% discount on up to three to four services, with a call-to-action to view all options and dynamic personalization.
Promote planning efficiency by including article recommendations in confirmation emails, guiding convertors to top attractions and beaches near the hotel.
Show customers benefits of keeping their booking after modification. Add a benefits list under the booking summary with a view-all perks button, and keep the section short to drive cross-sells.
Learn to deploy a 20-day pre-arrival email that excites guests and showcases hotel amenities and videos, while encouraging social sharing and pre-arrival up-sell content.
Create a one-day pre-arrival email with a booking summary and hotel details. Show arrival/departure dates, check-in/out times, transport options, airport transfer offers, and weather forecast; download the layout from resources.
Automate a third-day on-property email offering blog-based sightseeing ideas, exclusive tours, and hotel recommendations. Exclude guests who checked out or will check out on day three, boosting loyalty and reviews.
send post-stay emails to all previous guests, including direct and indirect bookers; collect emails at check-in via front desk and add them to your crm or rpm to boost bookings.
Learn to send birthday special offer emails triggered before guests' birthdays, using birth dates and emails to offer a free night or $100 off, with expiry options and downloadable layouts.
Promote seasonal hotel offers through bulk email campaigns, featuring per-season discounts, extended booking windows, and ample time for guests to book in advance, boosting direct bookings and revenue.
Launch email newsletters to blog subscribers and past guests to share new articles and updates. Promote services and special offers, engage readers, and drive direct bookings.
Use A/B testing to optimize hotel email templates by comparing subject lines, tone, layout, images, and buttons, letting customers decide content and boosting open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
Improve hotel websites' speed by optimizing image file sizes and file types, choosing the right format, sizing images precisely, and applying lossy compression before uploading to your CMS.
Enable gzip compression to compress HTML and CSS on the server, reducing page size and speeding delivery by up to 70 percent; check PageSpeed Insights for guidance.
Minify and combine HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to reduce HTTP requests and page size, removing comments, whitespace, and unneeded characters. Automate the process with a CMS plugin for easy implementation.
Combine multiple small images, such as icons, logos, and thumbnails, into a single sprite to reduce HTTP requests on hotel web pages, then use CSS to display the required portion.
Block unnecessary or irrelevant assets on CMS-based hotel sites, reduce HTTP requests from plugins, and use WordPress Asset Clean Up to detect and disable unused scripts.
Learn effective keyword research and optimization for hotels, prioritizing branded and generic keywords, using Google Ads data, and optimizing HTML title, meta description, headings, and image tags.
Apply internal link optimization to improve navigation, information hierarchy, and SEO ranking power; use keyword-optimized links to clarify pages and keep landing pages with pop-ups to drive conversions.
Translate your hotel website into multiple languages and run paid search campaigns with language-matched adverts, localized landing pages, and keyword research, segmentation, and negative keyword lists to boost direct bookings.
Add relevant price extensions to hotel paid search campaigns to boost quality scores, improve user experience, and reduce direct-booking costs by showcasing up to eight accommodation options with starting rates.
Use structured snippets to highlight hotel amenities and room types, boosting visibility in paid search, increasing click-through rates and quality scores, and lowering direct booking costs.
Discover how adding a stellar rating extension to hotel campaigns shows average star ratings beside paid search, and Google data indicates CTR rises by 17% with lower CPCs and CPAs.
Add app extensions to paid search campaigns to drive Android and iOS hotel app downloads by linking ads to app store destinations.
Use a location extension to help guests find your hotel with directions and a call button, and if budget allows, adopt it to drive walk-in bookings.
Add review extensions to paid search campaigns to display independent reviews and awards like World Travel Awards, boosting click-through rates and ad visibility; currently offered by Bing ads.
Add image extensions to paid search campaigns to boost attention with image-rich site links on Bing and Yandex, even though Google currently lacks the feature.
Exclude recent bookers from campaign targeting to reduce marketing spend and safeguard conversion quality. Implement JavaScript tracking, create conversion goals, and build last-30/60/90-day audience lists to exclude them.
Improve landing page speed to boost quality scores and reduce booking costs by delivering under two-second load times, improving user experience, conversions, and revenue.
Enable data driven attribution modeling to credit conversions across generic and branded keyword campaigns. See how this approach reveals the true contributions of generic campaigns to bookings in paid search.
Control ROAS in paid search campaigns either automatically or manually. Automate bidding toward a target ROAS, while manual review and daily reports adjust bids to prevent overspending.
Evaluate the performance of search engine partners after launching paid search campaigns, comparing Google search and its partners to assess conversions. Exclude partners with no conversions to save spend.
Exclude direct bookers from remarketing campaigns to save ad spend and prevent customer annoyance. Build 30, 60, and 90 day audience lists on the booking confirmation page and exclude them.
Target relevant hotel website visitors to improve direct bookings and avoid wasteful ad spend, focusing on audiences interested in services like restaurants, bars, meetings, events, rooms, weddings, gym, and spa.
Target previous landing page visitors to create a remarketing list that resonates with their demonstrated interest in booking, using programmatic platforms and landing-page data filters to boost conversions.
Combine remarketing with lookalike audience lists to target users who visited your site and resemble your convertors, using artificial intelligence technology to identify similar audiences and bid higher for convertors.
Use lookalike and artificial intelligence targeting to reach audiences similar to converters and website visitors, enabling lookalike lists via programmatic platforms after adding a JavaScript tracking code.
Design banners in multiple dimensions to meet Interactive Advertising Bureau standards for programmatic display campaigns. Using more sizes expands exposure, helps reach targeted audiences, and improves campaign performance.
Learn how to protect brand reputation online by implementing brand safety measures in programmatic advertising and using verification solutions to block ads next to high-risk content.
Explore metasearch advertising, which consolidates listings and rates across engines like Google hotel ads, Trivago, Skyscanner, and TripAdvisor, boosting visibility and paying for clicks or bookings, while reducing OTUS dependency.
Evaluate metasearch engines to advertise your hotel, recognizing distinct audiences and pricing models; Google Hotel Ads offers the widest reach with CPC or CPA and 10–18% commission.
Create a metasearch specific rate plan that subtly lowers rates to boost click-through and conversion, while noting it is a black hat tactic with rate parity risks.
Add call-out extensions to metasearch ads to highlight benefits such as free cancellation, priority room upgrade, 20 percent off dining in bar, and best rate guarantee, boosting click-through rates.
Do You Want to Become an Expert in Hotel Marketing?
If so, then you are in the right place, as this is the most extensive course on hotel marketing available online. It's also the only certification course that will help you gain 360-degree knowledge of hotel marketing. Indeed, by the end of this course, you will have learnt almost all latest marketing tactics for successfully acquiring direct and indirect bookings, as well as promoting other hotel facilities such as restaurants, bars, spa, gym and event spaces.
What You Will Learn
At the beginning of this course, I will introduce you to hotel marketing. More specifically, you will learn:
What hotel marketing is;
The current challenges in the hotel industry;
How to overcome all those challenges;
The benefits of increasing direct bookings;
The benefits of increasing exposure on OTAs;
The benefits of promoting hotel facilities;
Following those, you learn how to make your website a conversion machine by optimizing your landing page, homepage, and booking engine pages. In addition to those, you will learn how to generate more revenue per stay through the official hotel website. So, I will take you through several digital marketing ideas for pushing more people into the conversion funnel:
42 Landing Page Optimization Tactics
10 Homepage Optimization Tactics
45 Booking Engine Optimization Tactics
Next, I will take you through several hotel promotion ideas for acquiring up to 5 times more direct bookings at a really low cost-per-acquisition, through the official website of your hotel property. More specifically, I will take you through:
31 Email Marketing Tactics
27 Search Engine Optimization Tactics
44 Paid Search Advertising Tactics
29 Programmatic Advertising Tactics
10 Metasearch Advertising Tactics
32 Social Media Tactics
7 Native Advertising Tactics
13 Inbound Marketing Tactics
8 Conversion Rate Optimization Tactics
7 Reputation Management Tactics
5 Other Tactics For Acquiring Direct Bookings
Then, you will learn how to double your indirect bookings by optimizing your OTA listings, as well as running advertising campaigns on OTA websites. Those tactics will definitely help you outperform your direct competitors. In addition to those, you will learn how to successfully promote other hotel facilities, so that you could boost the overall revenue performance of your hotel business. So, I will take you through:
10 Tactics For Acquiring More Indirect Bookings
12 Tactics For Promoting Hotel Facilities (F&B, Wellness & Fitness Facilities, Event Spaces)
Who Is This Course For?
This course has no pre-requisites. So, it is suitable for anyone wanting to gain comprehensive knowledge of hotel marketing, whether they have no experience in the field or have been working in this industry for many years. This course will take you from the very basics to the more advanced aspects of hotel marketing. Therefore, it is ideal for:
Directors of Sales & Marketing
Vice Presidents
Chief Marketing Officers
Hotel Marketing Managers
Hotel Marketing Executives
Digital Marketing Professionals
Agencies Offering Marketing Services To Hotels
Consultants Offering Marketing Services To Hotels
Professionals with Traditional Marketing Background
Sales Managers
Sales Executives