As the impact of the coronavirus pandemic continues to develop, we know that travel businesses are facing unique and difficult changes. There are many ways to help people with future travel plans during this time. Here are some tips and recommendations for hotel property managers and marketers on managing your hotel inventory and surfacing what matters across Google.
Proactively communicate with travelers
- Update your Business Profile to reflect changes to your hours of operations or temporary closures. Be transparent about response times.
- Create a resources section on your website or a Google Form to field questions on cancellations, refund policies, and travel insurance.
Highlight flexible booking options in your hotel ads
- Ensure travelers can find your cancelable rates. Set cancelable and refundable room rates or a global refundable rates policy.
- Bring attention to your cancelation, refundability or rebooking policies in your callouts.
- If your pricing strategy has changed (or will continue to change), keep a close eye on your price accuracy. If your prices are unlikely to fluctuate, create rate rules to lessen your cache bandwidth needs.
Adjust your Hotel campaigns for the current landscape
- Segment your traffic by hotel attributes like advanced booking windows, location, device or length of stay to identify what is still converting well—such as people looking for last-minute stays or places to quarantine—and what’s not.
- Adjust your bids and bid adjustments on poor-performing segments. Re-evaluate your mobile bid adjustment strategy as people are more active on their mobile devices during this time.
- Consider commission (per conversion) bid strategy to pay only when the booking occurs and mitigate risk or commissions (per stay) bid strategy to transfer the risk of future bookings to Google.
- Learn more about bidding best practices and tips for hotel campaigns
Keep a pulse on the new normal with help from Google
- If you have an on-property restaurant, consider offering online food ordering for take-out or delivery with The Ordering.app.
- Brew travel interest by bringing the travel experience to life digitally with a free YouTube channel. Consider sharing local recipes, wellness tips or virtual city tours.
- Collaborate with your staff using shared documents, video meetings, email lists or chat rooms.
- See emerging topics and top questions asked by geography with Google Trends.
- Learn how other thought leaders are coping with similar business challenges on Think With Google.
Find additional recommendations for Google Ads campaigns, resources for businesses and up-to-date information on Google COVID-19 efforts.
See if you qualify for the Grow with Google Small Business Fund(US only) or Google Ads credits.
