Finding your locksmith moment, mastering your core strength and embracing functional design; this newsletter explores the power of simplicity. We examine how strategic positioning creates success, why doubling down on a single channel beats complexity, and what a recent SEO collapse teaches us about staying focused. From clever hotel innovations to ironic digital services, sometimes the most effective solutions are also the simplest ones.
OTAs did this extremely well with brand-jacking. Making ads on Hotel Meurice Paris and taking the revenue that would have gone to the hotel's website. Efficient but left a lot of bad taste.
You're right that this left a bad taste for many hotels who felt OTAs were intercepting their direct bookings. From the hotels' perspective, they're paying commission on guests who may have booked directly. That said, as long as Hotel Meurice was a hotel that is bookable on the OTA, we should not assume that all customers wanted to book direct and not via the OTA. If all customers preferred to book direct, it wouldn't have been economically viable for the OTA to bid on those branded keywords. And of course, hotels can also invest in performance marketing and bypass OTAs. But generating sales from performance marketing channels is generally way more expensive than the commission they pay OTAs. Anyway, hard to settle this :-)
OTAs did this extremely well with brand-jacking. Making ads on Hotel Meurice Paris and taking the revenue that would have gone to the hotel's website. Efficient but left a lot of bad taste.
You're right that this left a bad taste for many hotels who felt OTAs were intercepting their direct bookings. From the hotels' perspective, they're paying commission on guests who may have booked directly. That said, as long as Hotel Meurice was a hotel that is bookable on the OTA, we should not assume that all customers wanted to book direct and not via the OTA. If all customers preferred to book direct, it wouldn't have been economically viable for the OTA to bid on those branded keywords. And of course, hotels can also invest in performance marketing and bypass OTAs. But generating sales from performance marketing channels is generally way more expensive than the commission they pay OTAs. Anyway, hard to settle this :-)
We need much more time and many more beers to settle this.