How to build an effective hotel advertising campaign

March 5, 2024

The unique characteristics of your property warrant a tailored approach to your digital advertising campaigns. For the best results, it’s important to understand current travel trends for hotels, what strategies and advertising solutions will meet your unique needs, the various channels you can use, and how your campaign can support your goal of attracting more travelers. 

Let’s look at what you need to consider as you plan your campaign and the different approaches available to help you generate demand for your rooms. 

Understand travel trends for hotels   

Before formalizing your campaign strategy, it’s essential to understand the current hospitality industry landscape and any emerging trends. Like any business, the hotel industry isn’t static and is always shifting and evolving.  

This is why it’s essential to have a good grasp on hotel trends for 2024 — in your region and across the globe — because every shift in the tourism industry can impact the success of your advertising campaign based on how travelers plan and book.  

TravelAds Sponsored Listings, our cost-effective advertising solution, helps hotels target travelers to engage them at every stage of their shopping journey. With custom copy and images in TravelAds, you can leverage the latest trends to connect with travelers. 

Understand what’s happening in the industry with our exclusive first-party research. This data is collected from travelers looking and booking across our 200+ Expedia Group branded travel sites and apps to help you understand their values and behaviors. 

We encourage you to use these insights to help inform your goals and create unforgettable moments for guests.  

34%

of hotel guests booked via a mobile app

80%

of travelers visit an OTA before making a travel purchase

90%

of travelers say the vibe of a property is important when booking

In our custom research with Luth, our Path to Purchase study shows: 

• More than one-third (34%) of hotel guests booked via a mobile app, making it an important component of your campaign that you can take a step further by targeting travelers using a mobile device.  
• Since cost and deals are important to travelers — nearly half of all travelers find ads that feature promotions influential — you could highlight any special you’re offering. This could extend beyond a room rate promotion and include things like discounts on sightseeing tours, spa services, other special amenities or activities your hotel offers. 
• Most travelers — 80% — visit an OTA before making a travel purchase. That means it’s important to show up outside of your owned channels.  

Expedia’s Unpack ‘24 report includes hotel insights on what travelers are doing: 

• More than 90% of travelers say the vibe of a property is important when booking. Try playing up the mood of your space in your next TravelAds listing. Giving travelers the vibe they want can lead to better guest experiences. 
• Consider the impact of outdoor spaces on hotel bookings. We’ve seen an increasing interest in amenities like hot tubs, cold plunges, barrel saunas, paddle ball courts, and more. To attract travelers who are booking based on outdoor hotel features, you could highlight these amenities in your ads. 
• Go-cations are trending: Travelers want to enjoy celebratory getaways in hotels and vacation rentals. To help reach family and friends who are planning hotel getaways, you could highlight ways travelers celebrate at your hotel, from weddings to your hotel’s fine-dining options for birthdays, anniversaries, or other special events. 

Determine the goals of your campaign  

Now that you’ve got a handle on recent trends in the hospitality industry, it’s time to map out the tactical parameters of your campaign. To do this, it can be helpful to create a checklist that addresses the following: 

• Timeframe: Determine if you want to align revenue goals  to a certain season or if you want to increase package bookings throughout the year.  
• Type of bookings: Identify if you’re looking to increase weekday stays or increase room nights with business travelers or if you want to target family and friends searching for extended hotel getaways. You could even help increase your length of stay by focusing on bleisure travel and target guests mixing business and leisure.  
• Duration and cadence of your campaign: If there are specific windows during the year when you want to run special promotions for an annual event or address low bookings during the shoulder season, account for these variables in your campaign calendar. 
• Consistent monitoring: Depending on which of our advertising solutions you select, you should measure the impact of your campaigns weekly, monthly, or quarterly. You can also choose to do a mix of reporting. For example, if you’re using a flexible, pay-per-click solution like TravelAds, you may want to measure your campaign more frequently, while an approach like the immersive Go USA campaign will require more long-term monitoring. 
• Advertising budget: Funding for your campaign can fluctuate as travel seasons peak and ebb. An effective way to stretch your advertising budget is to enter a collective strategy with other similar hotels as part of a co-op campaign. These united efforts with hotels or destinations that have similar goals can deliver great results.  

TIP: For your campaign, map out SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Timely. Keeping each of these in mind will help you build a solid strategy from the start and provide a valuable reference for what you want to achieve throughout the year. 

Find the right advertising solution  

The advantage of our solutions is that they can help expand your reach through multiple channels, from social media and web to mobile and video. With our support, you can elevate awareness of your hotel brand, ensuring you stay top of mind with travelers wherever they search and book. 

As you consider which channels you want to use to activate your campaign, determine the weight you’ll give each channel. For example, do you want to start with hotel display ads that appear in search results and couple them with native ads targeted to specific travelers? If you’re in an exotic location or are targeting Gen Z travelers, is social media a priority channel? If you want to appeal to families, display ads that focus on family-friendly activities can help you connect with travelers looking for specific experiences. 

Here’s an overview of the most frequently used solutions we see implemented in hotel marketing plans: 

• TravelAds: Boost your position in search results and leverage traveler targeting with custom copy and images to drive bookings. This easy-to-use pay-per-click solution gives you complete control and flexibility. TravelAds lets you quickly test and optimize your ads, and our robust reporting dashboards make it easy to monitor your campaign in real time. With our new automated bidding feature, reaching your ideal traveler is easier and more efficient than ever. 
• Display advertising: Engage and inspire the right travelers at the right point in their journey with ads that are seamlessly integrated across our 200+ travel websites and apps.  
• Co-op campaigns: We understand the power of partnership, and we’ve seen great success from partners coming together with similar goals. That’s why we offer a solution that’s a collective and budget-friendly opportunity. To make it easy for you, we coordinate the hotels that want to participate.   

This is a short list of the solutions we offer travel marketers and advertisers to help them meet their advertising campaign goals. 

With decades of travel advertising media experience, we can help guide you to our solutions that can be tailored to your unique needs and objectives, whether you’re running a boutique hotel or managing advertising for a large global brand.   

To learn more about the advertising solutions we provide, connect with one of our experts today.   

   
¹The Path to Purchase, Luth Research and Expedia Group, 2023. 
²Unpack ’24, Expedia Group, 2023.