Hotel marketing
Hotel marketing questions, answered plainly
The questions independent hotel owners and managers ask most — direct bookings, OTA commission, channels, costs and how the work is measured. No sales copy, just answers.
Where to start
- How should a small independent hotel market itself on a limited budget?
- Start with what you already own: your brand search results, your Google Business Profile and your booking path. These are the three places guests who have already chosen you either complete a direct booking or leak to a commissioned channel, so fixing them costs little and pays fastest. Only after that is secure should budget go to paid media or content.
- What is the first thing to fix when direct bookings are low?
- Search your own hotel name in an incognito window. If the paid results and first organic listings are booking platforms rather than your own site, you are paying commission on guests who came to you by name — defending brand search is almost always the first fix, followed by a booking-path review.
- Can we do hotel marketing ourselves instead of hiring an agency?
- Yes, and many of the fundamentals — a complete Google profile, a fast mobile booking path, a rate-parity message, regular review responses — need consistency rather than specialist skill. Where an agency earns its fee is the compounding work: technical SEO, structured content, paid media management and revenue-aware campaign planning that a busy general manager rarely has the hours for.
- How long does hotel marketing take to show results?
- Channel and conversion fixes often show within 30 to 60 days because they act on demand you already attract. Local SEO and destination content compound over three to six months. Any honest plan separates these two timelines up front rather than promising everything in month one.
Channels and tactics
- Which marketing channels work best for independent hotels?
- For most independents, in order of return: brand search defence, local SEO and your Google Business Profile, direct booking conversion work, then email to past guests, then paid media aimed at specific soft weeks. Social media supports all of it but rarely fills rooms on its own for a property without a large following.
- How do we reduce OTA commission without losing bookings?
- Shift the mix, don't switch channels off. Keep OTAs for reach and distressed inventory, but capture the demand you generate yourself: defend your brand terms in paid search, make your own booking path faster than the platform's, add best-rate messaging, and email past guests directly. Even moving commissionable bookings from 70% to 55% of the mix is a permanent margin gain.
- Is Google Ads worth it for a small hotel?
- Brand-term defence is almost always worth it — the clicks are cheap relative to the commission they replace, because the searcher already picked you. Generic destination terms are far more expensive and competitive, so those budgets belong behind specific offers and soft-season dates where a conversion is worth predicting.
- How important are online reviews for a hotel?
- Very. Review volume, recency and your response pattern feed both ranking and conversion — a property with a slower review velocity than its local competitors loses on both. A simple ask-at-checkout workflow plus consistent responses usually moves the numbers within a quarter.
- Does social media actually book rooms?
- Rarely as a last click — guests don't complete bookings inside a feed. Social earns its keep earlier in the journey: showing the property in use, answering pre-arrival questions, and giving email and retargeting audiences something to remember you by. Judge it on assisted conversions and direct traffic, not bookings attributed to a platform.
- What should a hotel email list be used for?
- Past guests are your cheapest audience. The core rhythm is a pre-arrival upsell, a post-arrival review request, and two or three seasonal campaigns a year aimed at dates you need to fill — midweek, shoulder season, or the week after a local event. Guests who stayed once and enjoyed it convert at a fraction of the cost of new paid traffic.
- Should we list on Google Hotel Ads and metasearch?
- Yes — metasearch is now where rate comparison happens, and an absent listing reads as either closed or uncompetitive. The trap to avoid is bidding on your own brand name through a platform and paying their markup; run your own metasearch presence so the guest comparing rates finds you at, or effectively below, the OTA price.
Costs and contracts
- What is included in HMRA's hotel marketing plans?
- Both the £49.99/week Starter Package and the £999/year Super Deal cover the same scope: brand search defence, local SEO, booking-path conversion work, destination content, review management and monthly reporting on direct revenue and commission saved. The annual plan is the same work paid once for twelve months, at around 62% less.
- Is advertising spend included in the plan price?
- No. Media spend is separate and stays in your own accounts — you keep ownership of the campaigns, the data and any residual audience. We plan and manage the spend; you control the budget.
- Am I locked into a long contract?
- No. Retainers run on rolling monthly terms after an initial 90-day period, which is the minimum honest window for judging whether the plan is working. After that you can pause or stop with a month's notice.
- What size properties do you work with?
- Independent hotels, inns and boutique properties from around eight rooms upward, with or without a restaurant. Chains with centralised marketing usually have in-house teams; the operators who benefit most are those where marketing is one person's part-time responsibility.
Working with HMRA
- Do you only work with UK hotels?
- No. We run the same programmes for independent properties in the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE and South Africa, with local currency pricing, timezone cover and region-specific search targeting.
- How do you measure whether hotel marketing is working?
- On the numbers that decide whether the plan pays for itself: direct revenue share, channel mix, commission saved, RevPAR on targeted dates and cost per direct booking. You get a monthly report on those figures — not impressions and click counts.
- Who actually does the work?
- A small senior team — no account-manager relay. The person who audits your property is the person who builds and runs the campaigns, so decisions happen in one conversation instead of three.
- How do we get started?
- Run the free audit first. It reviews your brand search results, direct booking path and commission exposure, then sends a plan built around the weeks you most need to fill. If the numbers make sense, the starter plan begins from that audit — no separate discovery project to pay for.
Want the answers applied to your property?
The full hotel marketing service page covers what we build and manage, and the free audit shows where your direct bookings are leaking first.
Still have a question?
Ask it on a free 20-minute call
Bring the question this page didn't answer, plus your current booking mix, and we'll tell you honestly whether marketing can move it.