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Tourism and accommodation businesses are looking to increase revenue through growing direct bookings. If you are in these industries, don’t miss out on Metasearch, a useful tool to drive bookings to your website.
What is Metasearch?
Metasearch is defined as a tool that aggregates results from many search engines, thereby creating the final results for users.
In the travel and hotel industry, Metasearch gathers information from OTA channels and directly from hotels.
From the search results page on Metasearch, travellers can read all relevant listing information from different service providers and click the link to view more details or proceed with further action.
Unlike OTA channels, Metasearch is not a booking tool. Travellers do not make a reservation on Metasearch as they are redirected to a landing page such as OTAs or hotel websites for booking rooms.
Thus, Metasearch is not a booking platform but gathering hospitality service data from multiple sources as much as possible to display for users. Some popular Metasearch today are:
- Google (with Google Hotel Finder)
- HotelCombined
- TripAdvisor
- SkyScanner
- Kayak
- Kiwi
How Metasearch is applied in the travel and hotel industry?
Metasearch is considered as a strategic tool to promote and attract direct bookings for the tourism and hotel industry.
Metasearch channels will list results based on the keywords that customers search for. Accommodations should regularly update the basic information such as the address, number of available rooms, room rates, room types and other information related to services to increase the visibility at the top of the relevant results.
In case of accommodations using the booking engine system to control prices and room availability, the Metasearch channel will often be connected to this system to automatically update the information immediately without manual adjustment.
In addition, you need to have a booking page with all essential information because this is the destination of the tourists after pressing the reservation or view button on Metasearch. It is important for the booking conversion. Do not forget to provide the correct website address, update the website address if there is any change and optimize the booking engine on the website so that travellers can go through a simple but effective booking process.
These metasearch channels can contribute significantly to bringing organic traffic to the hotel’s booking page. However, to increase efficiency and visibility, hotels can combine advertising on the Metasearch to stay on top of recommendations to searchers. For example, Google is providing their free booking link service as a Metasearch channel to showcase relevant accommodations based on the user’s search. However, accommodations should utilize Google Hotel Ads to appear at the top of search results.
According to Google statistics, up to 87% of users will research hotels before making a booking decision, and Metasearch is one of their searched pages. Hence, start to think about applying Metasearch in your distribution strategy if you have not connected with any and reach a wider range of potential bookers.
Hotel Link has connected with some leading Metasearch channels such as TripAdvisor, Google to help boost our property clients’ online visibility. Contact us to learn more.
