This page is for owners, general managers and revenue managers of UK hotels, B&Bs, guest houses, inns with rooms and event venues who want Google Ads to bring bookings to their own website rather than paying commission to an online travel agent (OTA) for the same guest.
How guests look for a hotel on Google
Hotel searches fall into four broad groups, and each one is worth a different amount to you.
- Your name. Plenty of guests find you on Booking.com or Expedia first, then search for the hotel by name to look at the rooms, read reviews or check for a better rate. This is the guest the OTAs most want to win back, and their ads can appear on your name as well as their own.
- A place, often with a date. “Hotels in Bath this weekend”, “York hotel with parking”. These people are comparing, and Google’s own hotel results, with a map and prices from several sellers, take up much of the screen.
- A kind of stay. “Dog friendly hotel Lake District”, “spa break Cotswolds”, “boutique hotel near Paddington”. Narrower searches with fewer competitors, and usually the best ground for an independent hotel to compete with the chains.
- An occasion. Weddings, meeting rooms, Christmas parties, a race meeting, a graduation or a festival weekend. These are often enquiries rather than instant bookings, with a different value and a different person handling them.
The booking window varies too. A city hotel selling midweek rooms to business travellers sees bookings close to the date, while a country house selling summer breaks may take them months ahead. Both affect when the money should be spent.
What changes in Google Ads for a hotel
Protecting your own name
A brand campaign on your hotel’s name is usually the cheapest booking source in the account, and the one I set up first. Its job is to make sure a guest who has already chosen you lands on your site instead of an OTA listing that charges you commission for a guest you had already won. The ad should give real reasons to book direct, such as a better rate, breakfast included, free parking or easier cancellation, but only the ones that are true on your own booking engine. It is also worth reading your OTA agreements, because some contain clauses about who may advertise on your hotel’s name.
Campaigns for places and kinds of stay
Beyond your name, I build Google search campaigns around the stays you actually sell and the places guests associate you with: dog-friendly breaks, spa days, family rooms, a hotel near a particular station or venue. Generic searches such as “hotels London” are expensive and crowded with chains and OTAs, so I only buy them when the numbers show they pay. Each campaign carries a list of negative keywords to keep out searches for hotel jobs, hospitality courses, hostels and other things you do not sell.
Hotel prices in Google’s travel results
Google shows hotel prices in Search and Maps from a rate feed managed through Google Hotel Center. Free booking links cost nothing and are worth having on their own. Paid placements in those results run through hotel campaigns or Performance Max with travel goals, and both need a live connection to your booking engine or channel manager. They also put your direct rate next to the OTA rates for the same dates, so they only help when your own rate is at least as good.
Where your guests come from
Location targeting should follow where your guests live, not where the hotel stands. A seaside hotel in Cornwall might draw most of its guests from London, Bristol and the Midlands, so those are the areas to bid on, while people searching from the next street rarely book a room. Local targeting still makes sense for the restaurant, afternoon tea or events, which is one reason those deserve campaigns of their own.
Seasons, events and sold-out nights
I plan the budget against your occupancy, not the calendar alone. Spend goes up for the nights you need to fill, typically shoulder months, midweek and the gaps between events, and comes down when you are nearly full, because a click on a sold-out date costs the same as any other and returns nothing. Big local dates such as a festival, a race meeting or a conference usually get their own ads and pages, prepared well before guests start searching.
Prices, offers and UK rules
Any price in an ad has to be one a guest can actually book. The CAP Code expects a “from” price to be available in reasonable numbers, not a single room on one February night. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, unavoidable fees left out of a headline price count as drip pricing, so a price shown in an ad should be the total a guest will pay for that stay, including any compulsory charges.
Landing pages and the booking engine
A search for a spa break should land on the spa break page, with the dates and the booking button visible, not on the homepage. The handover to the booking engine is where many hotel visits are lost, because it often sits on a different domain, looks different and starts again with empty dates. Where the engine allows it, I pass the dates and offer through so the guest picks up where they left off. If the right page does not exist yet, it needs building before the campaign that points at it goes live.
Tracking bookings rather than button clicks
A click on “Book now” is not a booking. Because most booking engines run on a separate domain, they need cross-domain tracking, or the booking is recorded as coming from the engine itself instead of from your ad. I send the confirmed booking and its conversion value to Google Ads, so the account can tell a £680 three-night stay from a £95 single night, and I account for cancellations where the engine reports them. Under UK GDPR and PECR the tags also have to respect your cookie banner, which means consent mode set up properly. My guide to checking your conversion tracking works shows how I test this before any budget goes live.
A typical hotel account structure
A larger independent hotel might run something like the account below. A small B&B often needs only the first two campaigns, and adding more before those are working well usually just spreads the budget thinner.
| Campaign | What it covers | How I judge it |
|---|---|---|
| Brand search | Your hotel’s name, spellings and name plus town | How often you appear on your own name, and the cost per direct booking |
| Stay type and destination search | Spa breaks, dog-friendly stays, hotels near a venue or station | Booking revenue against ad spend |
| Hotel prices or Performance Max for travel | Your rates in Google’s hotel results and Maps | Direct bookings and revenue, set against the commission they replace |
| Events and groups search | Weddings, meetings, private dining, group stays | Enquiries that turn into confirmed events |
| Remarketing | People who looked at rooms or dates but did not book | Bookings it adds beyond what brand search would have caught |
The comparison I find most useful is simple: what did a booking cost through Google Ads, and what would the same booking have cost in OTA commission? If the direct booking is cheaper and the guest is someone you would not otherwise have reached, the campaign is doing its job.
Mistakes I see in hotel accounts
- Counting clicks on the booking button as conversions. The account reports dozens of “bookings” a week, the booking engine shows a handful, and automated bidding chases the wrong signal.
- Brand and generic results added together. Brand search makes the whole account look profitable while the generic campaigns lose money underneath.
- No brand campaign at all. The OTAs collect the guests who searched for you by name, and you pay them commission for it.
- A direct rate higher than the OTA rate. Paying to send guests to your site, where they find the same room is cheaper on Booking.com.
- Spending on full nights. Budgets left running at the same level through the busiest weeks of the year.
- Every ad pointing to the homepage. The guest who searched for a dog-friendly room has to hunt for the dog policy.
- Performance Max taking credit for brand searches. Without brand exclusions, it can pick up guests searching your name and report them as new revenue.
Where Google Ads sits alongside your other channels
Google Ads catches guests who are already searching. Hotel SEO builds the organic listings and the Google Business Profile that bring in the same guests without a cost per click, and for many hotels it matters more over the long run. Facebook and Instagram ads for hotels work earlier, putting your rooms in front of people before they have picked a destination. If you would like one plan across all of these, my digital marketing for hotels and hospitality covers how they fit together. Tour operators and travel companies have different needs, set out on my page on Google Ads for tour operators.
Next step
Send me the name of your booking engine, the nights you most need to fill and, if you already run Google Ads, read access to the account. I will start by checking whether bookings are being tracked correctly, because nothing else in the account can be judged until they are, and I will tell you plainly whether paid search is likely to pay for your hotel. Book a call about your hotel and we can go through it together.