MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—A publicly traded company since 2004, Google has proven to be extremely profitable. In large measure, the company’s name has become synonymous with Internet search, but it also has made successful inroads into the related areas of mobile, display advertising and video.
At the heart of Google’s profitability is its relationship with its partners in various industries, including the hotel industry. Last month, the company’s Head of Industry/Travel David Pavelko outlined some new ways hotels can benefit from the relationship.
What Google users see at the top of the page when they conduct a basic search is paid advertising. Below that is what Google calls the “organic results” of the search. With that as a starting off point, Pavelko, who is based in Google’s offices in New York, and his sales team work with all the company’s partners to help them better understand the more sophisticated opportunities that are available for both increased visibility and revenue-producing benefits.
Market-specific search
“We’ve focused over the past 18 months on destination-type queries. What our partners really like is when users are actually looking for a hotel in a certain market because it helps them better understand what demand looks like in that market,” Pavelko told Hotel Business last month.
Google has brought a lot of databases together internally in the past year-and-a-half to help answer questions like these that are so strategically important to a hotel company. So, if Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide or IHG, for example, wanted to know what demand looks like in Orlando, Pavelko and his team can provide them with data year-over-year or week-over-week.
“We’re working to provide some predictability, based on the past, as to what they can expect would happen in the future. In that way, they can make better-informed decisions. When users conduct a search about a specific hotel in a market, we can compare that against the competitive set and say this is what demand looks like and this is what your performance looks like,” Pavelko explained. Online travel agencies (OTAs) find this information equally helpful.
With Google’s help, hotel companies, individual brands, individual hotels, management companies and others can dig down deeper. “If a hotel company’s supply is weak in a certain market and demand looks pretty strong, the hotel company can decide to get more aggressive from a Google standpoint to help drive volume and conversions,” he noted.
This can be a particularly beneficial during tough periods or leading up to a seasonal event like July 4th or Labor Day. “We try to use these seasonal patterns to provide our hotel partners with insights that are actionable. We try to make recommendations they can act upon,” he said.
Some Google hotel partners manage their search marketing internally with their own in-house group, while others use an outside agency. Google may already have a relationship with the outside agency, if the agency has been buying traditional search ads on behalf of the hotel partner. “Whether the support is internal or external, the question is ‘Who is making sure the partner is taking advantage of search in a meaningful way?’”
Google will work with hotel partners to make them aware of new opportunities across search, mobile, display advertising and video, Pavelko noted. Certain tools have more applicability than others at different points in the travel cycle.
Specifically for search, for example, Google maintains a team that works with hotels to make key word suggestions that make sense for them.
“We try to point out where they’re missing an opportunity or where they can take advantage of unexpected demand in a market,” Pavelko explained. “The more we know about particular partners and understand their hotel footprint, the better we can match up the data we have to help them make more advantageous decisions.”
Major hotel companies on the order of Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide or IHG have the aggregate view of everything related to distribution. They have individual brands beneath them that make decisions relevant to their target audience and Google bubbles up information to help them with that.
“We’re seeking ways we can better inform—for lack of a better term—the field,” Pavelko said. “How can we do a better job of educating, so properties are smarter, ownership groups are smarter, management groups are smarter? So that when a brand or hotel company executes a particular program with us, the properties, franchisees and other owner and managers are much better educated about what that is.”
Adding to the challenge, educating in the hotel business means educating at scale. “It’s very difficult to go and speak to tens of thousands of properties and tens of thousands of owners. Yet the smarter everybody gets about all the digital tools available, the overall level of knowledge will rise and we’ll all benefit,” he concluded.
—Bruce Serlen