What TripAdvisor can teach independent hotels about shifting share from OTAs

A big score for independent hotels (and of course TripAdvisor)

There's certainly no shortage of activity coming from TripAdvisor.  The company recently shifted some focus to metasearch, redesigned its site, acquired content-rich Oyster.com, and launched the independent hotels' newest best friend . . . TripConnect.

TripConnect is a new service that empowers indie hotels like never before when it comes to online marketing and driving direct sales and bypassing OTAs.  These smaller properties can now integrate their web booking engine to TripAdvisor's metasearch, and thus display live rates and availabilities for shoppers who perform a dated search.  By combining the hotel's presence on TripAdvisor metasearch with the right room pricing and bidding strategies, the savvy indie hotel operator can take the first series of steps in winning back channel share from OTAs.  And as OTA click through and conversion rates decline for a particular hotel, they just might scale back their own bidding and thus reduce marketing costs for the indie operator in the long term.

But what about Google?  For those indie hotel operators that have AdWords campaigns running already, should they be plugging into TripConnect and shifting marketing spend to TripAdvisor?  In general it's a wise approach to diversify and spend on both Google and TripAdvisor.  After all, TripAdvisor is one hell of a strong brand, but there are areas in the world where their name is virtually unknown.  So answering this question in detail really depends on the hotel product, destination, and its primary source markets.

But one thing is for sure.  Because TripAdvisor's metasearch allows for dated searches and the new TripConnect service plugs directly into indie hotels' booking engines, there is no wasted ad spend on dates that are unavailable because it wouldn't be possible for the shopper to click through in the first place.

Furthermore, TripAdvisor creates a smoother shopping experience (from research to price shopping) which should ultimately lead to a more highly qualified customer.  In the e-commerce world of performance marketing, that usually translates into much better conversions.

TripConnect offers a number of other added benefits, but at the end of the day it all boils down to one thing.  Independent hotels now have the most powerful tool to help them claw back bookings from high cost OTA distribution channels.  The fact that it's more effective than Google AdWords or Hotel Finder is just icing on the cake.

Google.  It's your move now.

Example of TripConnect in action.  Although in this case HotelClub's lower price is undermining the hotel's efforts.