We get a ton of questions regarding OTAs from customers.
What is an OTA?
An OTA, or online travel agent, is a travel website that potential guests can use to plan their trip. They specialize in the sale of travel products to customers. The variety includes:
- flights
- hotel rooms
- car rentals
- cruises
- activities
- travel packages
- vacation rental units
In the lodging industry, we focus on travel websites that focus on helping consumers book a stay at a hotel, bed and breakfast, or vacation rental.
The list of OTAs is endless, but examples of the most commonly known OTAs are:
- The Priceline Group (Booking.com, Priceline.com, agoda.com, KAYAK, OpenTable)
- Expedia, Inc. (Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Trivago, Travelocity, HomeAway, VRBO)
- TripAdvisor Inc (tripadvisor.com)
- Airbnb
A lot of customers have an emotional reaction whenever OTAs are mentioned, and it’s almost always negative.
Many of our customers come to us because they want us to help them, “beat the OTAs”. That is, remove entirely their dependency on the OTAs.
While reducing dependency is a fantastic goal, removing yourself entirely from the OTAs is no longer realistic.
Let’s look at this from the perspective of a bed and breakfast in Wisconsin that’s deciding whether to keep working with a given OTA. Switch-out a location and lodging vertical, and this advice will remain the same.
SEO Benefits of Being Listed on OTAS
Bedandbreakfast.com, Expedia, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, etc, are all OTAs, but they’re all also high-authority directories in both human searchers and Google’s eyes.
Online Travel Agents are also Online Directories
So if they want to be associated with the thought of being a “Wisconsin bed and breakfast”, for example, they want to be on the most authoritative lists of Wisconsin bed and breakfasts.
How will you know what lists are the most authoritative in Google’s and people’s eyes?
The lists of Wisconsin bed and breakfasts that are considered highest authority are going to the ones at the top of Google’s search results, like Bedandbreakfast.com.
Search Engines also consider “signs” and “Hints” of authority in their rankings
And just because you don’t have a link from a website to yours doesn’t mean having a presence on it doesn’t help your SEO. Facebook very rarely permits “follow” links on its site (the majority are “nofollow”, meaning they tell crawlers to not follow the link and treat it as if it doesn’t exist), but having a “listing”, or business page, on Facebook is one of the most important things to do from an SEO perspective for a business.
Having a business page, or listing, on Facebook, is a way to give a hint to potential visitors to your website, both bot and human, that you are a legitimate business at a specific location, with a specific phone number to call, that will answer to a specific name. Facebook does some work of verifying that businesses are legitimate, so the proof that Facebook thinks you’re legitimate will not solve everything, but will help with developing authority online.
Things to Consider vis-à-vis Competitors with OTAs
But your customer also needs to think about where their competitors are listed. So if your competitor two towns over is on Bedandbreakfast.com and you’re not, you risk people not even finding you because they searched for a place to stay on Bedandbreakfast.com, rather than a Google search. An even worse scenario would be a Google search that led to a page on Bedandbreakfast.com and led to the competitor that’s listed there, but not your customer.
On top of all this, most if not all of the OTAs have moved to the same pay-to-play format that the other OTAs have. That means customers only have to pay those OTAs when the OTA actually scores them a booking. So they can be listed for free on top online directories, but only have to pay when they get a booking. And while the 15-25% per booking cost may hurt, I as an innkeeper, I would rather get 75-85% of a booking than 0% because that potential guest booked somewhere else.
Of course, this is a broad guide, but consider this perspective when helping your customer make decisions regarding working with OTAs.
What to Think About from a Revenue Management Perspective
Most OTAs have cornered the market in terms of last-minute bookings. More often than not, users of OTAs (including this writer) plan trips very last minute compared to other travelers. The booking process is simple, easy, and on a platform they know and trust from previous experiences booking.
One drawback to OTA bookings is that they’re also typically shorter in terms of number of nights.
As such, a booking from an OTA is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Most hotels, bed and breakfasts, and vacation rental companies with a clear revenue management strategy use OTAs to sop-up last minute remaining availability and gaps of room-nights between larger bookings that were made for longer periods of time and farther in advance.
So, focus on training your clientele to book farther in advance to get the room or unit they want for the period they want. Then, fill remaining availability with last-minute bookings from OTAs like Booking.com or VRBO.
How to Decide on Keeping a Listing on an OTA
- Know the cost to stay listed on a site. A flat fee is very different from a per-booking fee.
- Review online bookings and leads generated from traffic that comes from links from the OTA you’re reviewing.
- See where that listing gains you additional exposure. For example, if you want to be recognized as a “Wisconsin bed and breakfast”, do a search for that keyword and see what OTAs are likely among the top results for that term. Prioritize being listed on those OTA websites.
- Even if you don’t necessarily see a concrete ROI from a listing, some of the major listing sites we recommend at most scaling-back on your investment while still maintaining a presence. It may not make sense to pay for a link from TripAdvisor to your website, for example, but having a presence on the site is a necessity.