Turn searchers into bookings.
We drive direct bookings for travel and hospitality brands with paid campaigns, SEO and conversion-focused sites.
Common challenges
- OTA dependence
- Seasonal demand
- Thin margins
How we solve them
- Direct-booking funnels
- Seasonal campaigns
- Brand content
Recommended services for travel & hospitality
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What we actually do differently for travel & hospitality, service by service.
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Every strategic question in travel and hospitality resolves back to one number: the commission you pay an OTA. MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Booking.com and Agoda typically take 15–25% of the booking value, and for many independent Indian properties that single line item exceeds the entire marketing budget. A property doing ₹2 crore a year through OTAs at 20% is paying ₹40 lakh in commission — which reframes the whole problem. You are not trying to grow bookings. You are trying to move existing bookings from a channel that costs 20% to one that costs considerably less, and every rupee shifted lands directly on the bottom line.
That does not make OTAs the enemy, and the most expensive mistake in this sector is treating them as one. OTAs deliver genuine incremental demand — travellers who would never have found you — and they produce the billboard effect: research consistently shows that visibility on a large OTA increases direct enquiries and direct bookings for the same property. Delisting is almost always value-destroying. The correct posture is to keep OTAs for discovery while systematically capturing everything downstream of it, especially the traveller who has already found you and is now searching your name.
The third fact is that the auction is not winnable head-on. OTAs bid on generic destination terms with budgets and lifetime-value models no single property can match, and they will happily bid on your property name too, because a click on your brand term costs them a fraction of the commission it earns. Competing for 'hotels in Goa' is a donation. Competing for your own name, for the long-tail experience and planning queries the OTAs cover poorly, and for the map pack is where a property's margin advantage actually shows up.
How travellers actually plan and book in India
Inspiration comes from social and video, and it comes early. A traveller sees a reel, a creator video or a friend's photograph and forms a destination preference weeks or months before any booking behaviour begins. This phase produces no measurable conversions and is the first thing cut when budgets tighten, which is why so many travel accounts oscillate between working and not working across a season.
Research is fragmented and long. For domestic leisure travel, the window between first serious research and booking commonly runs two to eight weeks; for international and for peak-season domestic, considerably longer. Business travel and last-minute weekend trips compress it to days or hours. The practical consequence is that a single attribution window and a single retargeting duration cannot serve both, and defaulting to a seven or fourteen-day window will make your planning-stage content look worthless.
Shortlisting then happens on OTAs, which is uncomfortable but true — travellers use their filters because nothing else aggregates supply that way. Your listing quality, photograph set and review score determine whether you enter the consideration set at all, regardless of how good your own website is.
Then comes the moment the entire direct strategy hinges on. Having shortlisted you, a large share of travellers search your property name to check the official site, look for a better rate, or simply verify you exist. That search is the single most valuable query in the sector, and it is routinely lost — to an OTA paid ad, to an aggregator, or to the property's own site loading slowly and lacking live rates. Defending it is the highest-return work available in a travel account, because the click is cheap and the alternative is paying full commission on a booking you had already won.
Booking itself fails on friction more than on price. A 'check availability' button that reloads into a third-party booking engine on a different domain, with different styling and a mandatory account creation, loses bookings that were ready to happen. And after the stay, reviews do more for future conversion than any design or copy change — review volume and recency drive OTA ranking and direct-site trust simultaneously, which makes a systematic post-stay review process a marketing channel rather than an operations chore.
What each channel is actually for
Not every channel does the same job in travel & hospitality. Here's how we use each one.
Google Ads
In travel, Google Ads is a defensive and long-tail instrument, not a volume instrument. Conceding generic head terms to the OTAs and concentrating spend on brand, on specific experiences and on the metasearch surfaces is what turns a losing auction into a profitable one.
- Defend brand and property-name terms with exact match and high impression share — an OTA taking that click costs you full commission on a booking you had effectively already earned
- Target long-tail experience and logistics queries the OTAs neglect — 'resort with private pool near Udaipur', 'pet friendly homestay Coorg', 'hotel near Indore airport with early check-in'
- Use Google Hotel Ads and the free booking links in the hotel module; the free links cost nothing and place your direct rate directly against OTA rates in the same comparison
- Pace budget against real booking windows and seasonality rather than a flat monthly spend, and pull spend forward into the lead-up weeks that actually convert
SEO & content
OTAs dominate transactional travel search and cover planning intent poorly. Content that answers the questions travellers ask before they know where to book captures them upstream of the OTA, and it is the only channel in this sector that compounds instead of resetting each season.
- Build genuine planning content — itineraries, best-time-to-visit, how to reach, what a trip realistically costs — with specificity a national listings page cannot match
- Own the local search surface: Google Business Profile with current photos, correct amenities, live hours and a steady review flow, for the property and for each outlet within it
- Implement Hotel, LodgingBusiness, Room and Review structured data, and keep rates and availability accurate so listings surface correctly
- Publish for the branded long tail — 'property name reviews', 'property name direct booking', 'property name distance from airport' — before an aggregator ranks for them instead of you
Meta Ads
Meta is where the desire that eventually becomes a booking gets created. Creative carries the campaign almost entirely, and retargeting has to be patient enough to still be present when the trip is finally planned — which is usually well beyond the default window.
- Sell the experience rather than the amenity list — a video of the morning view converts better than a carousel of room features, and the room features belong on the booking page
- Set retargeting windows to match the real planning cycle, commonly 60–180 days for leisure, with creative that changes as the window narrows rather than repeating the same ad
- Build seasonal and festival pacing into the plan — Diwali, Christmas–New Year, summer holidays and long weekends drive demand spikes that flat monthly budgets systematically miss
- Retarget abandoned bookings within the hour over email and WhatsApp; travel abandonment recovery rates are among the highest of any category because the intent was genuine
Website & booking engine
The direct-booking site exists to convert a traveller who has already chosen you, at a rate that beats what they can see on the OTA. Anything that adds a step, a redirect or a doubt between that decision and the confirmation is costing margin directly.
- Show live availability and rates on the page rather than behind a 'check availability' round trip to a differently-styled third-party domain
- Make the direct advantage explicit and specific — free breakfast, guaranteed upgrade, late checkout, no cancellation fee — rather than a vague best-rate claim nobody verifies
- Display the all-in price including taxes and fees up front; drip pricing is both a conversion killer and a specified dark pattern under Indian consumer guidelines
- Build for a phone on a weak connection, since a large share of travel research happens on mobile in transit, and keep the booking flow to the fewest fields that a confirmation genuinely requires
Reputation & reviews
In hospitality, review volume, recency and rating influence conversion more than website design, photography or copy. They also drive OTA ranking, which determines whether you are seen at all, making reviews the one asset that works on both channels simultaneously.
- Run a systematic post-stay review request at the moment satisfaction peaks — at checkout or within a day, not a week later through a generic email
- Respond to every review, particularly the negative ones, in a way that reads as useful to the next prospect rather than defensive to the last guest
- Track review velocity as a standing metric; a property with 400 reviews averaging 4.3 and two new ones a week outperforms one with 900 reviews averaging 4.5 and nothing recent
- Never buy or incentivise reviews — it violates platform policy, and the Bureau of Indian Standards has published a framework for online consumer reviews that the consumer affairs ministry has repeatedly signalled it may make mandatory
The mistakes we see most often
Every one of these is something we've inherited from a previous agency in travel & hospitality.
Trying to outbid OTAs on generic destination terms
An OTA bidding on 'hotels in Jaipur' is buying demand across hundreds of properties and amortising the cost across all of them. A single property bidding on the same term is buying the same expensive click with one chance of relevance. The cost per booking that results is almost always worse than the commission you were trying to avoid.
Concede the head terms deliberately and redeploy that budget into brand defence, long-tail experience queries, metasearch and the planning-content layer. It feels like retreat and it is the single change that most reliably makes a travel account profitable.
Not bidding on your own property name
The usual objection — 'we already rank organically for it' — ignores that the paid slots sit above the organic result and that OTAs and aggregators bid there routinely. A traveller who has already chosen you clicks the OTA ad, and you pay full commission on a booking you had won. The brand click typically costs a few rupees; the commission costs thousands.
Run brand as an always-on exact-match campaign with high impression share, and measure it against commission avoided rather than against a generic ROAS target. Where a specific OTA is bidding aggressively on your name, that is also a contractual conversation worth having with them.
Undercutting OTA rates without reading the contract
Many OTA agreements contain rate-parity clauses restricting you from publishing a lower public rate elsewhere. Breaching them can cost you ranking, visibility or the listing itself. The regulatory position in India has moved — the Competition Commission has acted against parity and exclusivity practices among online travel agencies — but that does not retroactively rewrite what you signed.
Read your specific contract, then compete on value rather than headline rate. Free breakfast, room upgrades, late checkout, flexible cancellation and member-only rates behind a login are typically outside parity restrictions and are more persuasive than a 5% price difference in any case.
Running a flat monthly budget through severe seasonality
Travel demand in India is violently seasonal and event-driven — hill stations in summer, Goa and Rajasthan in winter, everything around Diwali and Christmas, wedding season for banqueting. A flat budget underspends when demand is peaking and burns money when nobody is planning a trip.
Build the media plan from your own booking-window data — how far ahead do guests actually book, by segment and season — and pace spend into those lead-up weeks. For a property whose peak-season guests book six weeks ahead, the campaign that matters runs six weeks before the peak, not during it.
Treating the booking engine as an IT decision
Booking engines are usually bought on price and feature list, then bolted onto the website as a redirect to another domain with different branding, a different layout and no mobile optimisation. The drop-off at that handoff is frequently the largest single conversion loss in the entire funnel and nobody owns it.
Measure the funnel across the handoff explicitly — how many people click through to the engine, how many reach payment, how many complete. Then choose or configure the engine for conversion: same domain or a seamless embed, consistent design, no forced account creation, and UPI available alongside cards.
Judging campaigns on last-click bookings
With planning windows running weeks to months, last-click attribution credits the brand search that closed the booking and gives nothing to the inspiration content and retargeting that created it. Optimise on that view for two quarters and the top of the funnel is defunded, after which bookings decline for reasons the report cannot explain.
Extend attribution windows to match your real booking window, hold a blended cost-per-direct-booking view across all channels, and run geographic holdouts on the awareness layer when you need evidence rather than argument. Judge travel campaigns on a rolling quarter, not month to month.
The numbers that actually matter
Direct share of total bookings
The strategic number for the whole sector. It measures the thing you are actually trying to change, it is unaffected by attribution disputes, and moving it a few points changes the profit and loss more than most operational improvements a property can make.
Cost per direct booking, against commission avoided
The only fair benchmark for direct marketing spend is the OTA commission it displaced. A direct booking acquired at 8% of booking value is a win against a 20% commission even though it looks expensive next to a typical e-commerce CPA.
Net revenue per booking by channel
Average daily rate after commissions, discounts, payment fees and the cost of any direct-booking perk. Two channels producing identical gross bookings can differ enormously here, and gross booking value will never show it.
Brand search impression share
A direct readout of how much of your own demand is being intercepted. If it is sitting at 60%, roughly four in ten travellers searching for you by name are seeing someone else first — and that someone else charges you a commission for the introduction.
Review velocity and rating trend
Recency matters as much as volume in both OTA ranking and traveller trust. Tracking new reviews per week and the rolling ninety-day average rating catches service problems before they show up in bookings, which is roughly one season too late.
Booking window by segment and season
How far ahead guests actually book is the input that makes budget pacing, retargeting duration and attribution windows correct rather than guessed. Most properties have this data in the PMS and have never looked at it.
Vanity metrics to ignore
Website sessions, social followers, gross booking value before commission, and OTA ranking treated as an end in itself. Sessions rise every time you publish destination content that nobody books from, and OTA ranking is a means to demand, not a measure of profit.
Pricing disclosure, tax rules and platform policy
Price display is where travel marketing most often runs into consumer law. The Central Consumer Protection Authority's dark-pattern guidelines specifically name drip pricing — revealing taxes, service fees or mandatory charges only at the final step — and false urgency, which covers the 'only 1 room left at this price' and countdown-timer conventions the OTAs made standard. Genuine, accurately reported scarcity remains permissible; manufactured scarcity does not. For a property competing on trust against OTAs, showing the all-in price early is a conversion advantage as well as a compliance position.
Tax display needs care because the rates have changed more than once. GST on hotel accommodation is banded by room tariff, with the lower band carrying restrictions on input tax credit, and restaurant services within hotels are treated differently depending on the room tariff threshold. Verify current slabs before publishing rate cards, and be explicit on the page about whether displayed rates include GST — ambiguity here generates disputes at checkout and at checkout counters. Outbound tour operators have an additional consideration: tax collected at source on overseas tour packages under Section 206C(1G) of the Income Tax Act, at a lower rate up to a specified annual threshold and a higher rate beyond it, which materially affects the price a customer actually pays and should be disclosed before payment rather than discovered during it.
Hospitality carries a stack of sector-specific obligations that also shape what you may claim. Star classification is granted by the Ministry of Tourism and may not be self-awarded — advertising an unclassified property as a five-star is a straightforward misrepresentation. FSSAI licensing and display requirements apply to all food service. State-level registrations, fire safety and excise licensing vary and are commonly checked. On service charge, the consumer affairs department's guidelines hold that it cannot be levied automatically or made mandatory on food and beverage bills; the matter has been contested in court, so confirm the current position, but the safe and commercially sensible practice is to make any such charge clearly optional and visible before ordering.
Two further notes. The Advertising Standards Council of India's code applies to travel imagery, and using photographs that misrepresent the view, the room or the proximity to a beach or landmark is a recurring complaint category — as is the unlabelled use of stock or AI-generated imagery for real rooms. And the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs guest data: passport and identity details, stay history and preferences collected at booking and check-in are personal data with consent, purpose and retention obligations, and hotel systems that hold decades of guest records with no retention policy are common and increasingly exposed.
This is a practitioner's summary of how these rules affect campaign work, not legal advice. Get your own counsel to review anything you publish.
What the first 90 days look like
Establish the baseline
- Compute the real channel mix — direct versus each OTA — and net revenue per booking after commissions and fees
- Pull booking-window data from the PMS by segment and season to inform pacing and attribution windows
- Audit brand search impression share and identify who is bidding on your property name
- Review the rate-parity terms in each OTA contract before designing any direct-rate advantage
- Audit price display, tax disclosure and imagery against consumer-protection and ASCI expectations
Build the direct channel
- Launch always-on brand defence and enrol in Google Hotel Ads and free booking links
- Fix the booking-engine handoff — live rates on page, consistent design, UPI and card payments, no forced account creation
- Define and publish a specific direct-booking advantage that stays within parity terms
- Rebuild Google Business Profile and structured data for the property and its outlets
- Start the post-stay review programme with a defined trigger point and response ownership
Capture demand upstream
- Publish the first planning-intent content cluster around your destination and its logistics
- Launch inspiration creative on Meta with retargeting windows matched to the real booking cycle
- Set up abandoned-booking recovery over email and WhatsApp within the hour
- Re-pace budget against seasonal booking windows rather than calendar months
- Report on direct share, cost per direct booking against commission avoided, and review velocity
Travel & Hospitality questions
Almost never, and certainly not early. OTAs deliver travellers who would not otherwise have found you, and the billboard effect is real — visibility on a large OTA measurably increases direct enquiries for the same property. The goal is not to eliminate the channel but to change the mix: let OTAs do discovery, then capture everything downstream, particularly the traveller who has found you there and is now searching your name. A property that goes from 85% OTA to 55% OTA has transformed its economics without giving up reach.
Yes, and it is usually the highest-return line in the account. The paid slots sit above your organic listing, and OTAs and aggregators bid on property names because a click costs them far less than the commission it earns. The comparison that matters is not cost per click against organic traffic being free — it is a few rupees for the click against 15–25% of the booking value if someone else takes it. Measure it as commission avoided and the case is usually obvious.
That depends entirely on your specific contracts and you should read them rather than take a general answer. What generally holds is that parity clauses restrict the publicly displayed room rate, not the total value of the offer. Free breakfast, guaranteed upgrades, late checkout, flexible cancellation, dining credit and member-only rates behind a login are usually outside the restriction and, in practice, persuade better than a small headline discount. Travellers respond more strongly to a tangible inclusion than to a 5% price difference they have to work out.
Usually the booking engine handoff. Most properties send visitors from a well-designed site to a third-party engine on a different domain, with different styling, a slow mobile layout and an account-creation step — and nobody measures the drop-off across that boundary because it spans two systems. Instrument it end to end first. The other common causes are rates that are not visible until after a form submission, an all-in price that only appears at the last step, and no stated reason to book direct rather than returning to the OTA tab that is still open.
Planning-intent content typically takes six to twelve months to build meaningful organic traffic, and the bookings lag the traffic because the content is caught upstream of intent. Branded and property-specific queries rank far faster, often within weeks, and local map-pack presence commonly improves within two to four months with disciplined Google Business Profile and review work. If you need bookings this quarter, brand defence, metasearch and abandoned-booking recovery are the levers; content is what makes next year cheaper.
They are worth setting up because they cost nothing and place your direct rate alongside the OTA rates in the same comparison module, at precisely the moment a traveller is deciding whether to book direct. Volume varies considerably by property type and location, and they will not replace paid activity. The practical requirement is a rate feed through a channel manager or approved integration partner, plus accurate live availability — properties usually fail here on data quality rather than on demand.
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