Discussion on Linkedin about holiday rentals and B&B business:
Group: Hotel Owners
Discussion: Has anyone in the UK tried a paid for Tripadvisor Business Listing and if so how much business has it brought you?
I believe the problem is soon going to get much more serious for individual B&B and small hotel owners – Tripadvisor, Booking.com and many other very larger aggregation websites are getting into position to dominate all reservations and bookings for accommodation required by travelers.
With present technology which is mostly Websites and Search engines, they are already buying the top terms with their huge websites having tens of thousands of pages covering most search terms – even using the same names in sub-domain as the individual owners sites – plus they have big budgets and can saturate advertising slots.
In addition they are becoming the “default” reference sites for travelers to look at to ascertain the quality of a place (especially Tripadvisor) – this is bad enough and is encouraging most renters to look first at the large sites where they “feel” comfortable and secure, plus they can book with one click and use credit cards in local currency.
Accommodation owners are playing into their hands by referring to their “reviews” and using their advertising services. To add insult to injury they are charging people for advertising whilst hoovering up all the listings. All of them are offering “free” listings at present as a warm-up to their planned dominance of the market.
But worse is soon to come, already more people are looking and booking through mobile devices – iPhones iPads etc – more than half of our own bookings come this way already and most guests “check” us out on Tripadvisor first (we just have a listing which is not paid). The problem is that these customers soon will not be using search engines to find us, they will be using “apps” and the apps will be under the control of the same aggregators as they have large numbers of listings already registered
So, I estimate by the middle of next year, most bookings will be coming from people who find B&B or hotel accommodation etc from their mobile through a map or planning application – if you are not there listed in these apps and maps you will not get these enquiries.
Worse still, you do not have the opportunity to present the value of your B&B – just the location on a pin on a map with dozens of other local pins around you.
The advertising site does not care which one the customer chooses, they will get their commission (from 15 to 30 percent) only once from that customer anyway.
I am trying to put some self-help non-profit groups together where we can unite and address the future of marketing our services
Posted by Tony Tidswell
Link to original article: Linkedin group comments
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