How hotels get found on Google, and which of the doors costs you commission

A guest looking for a room in your town sees four things before they see your website: the adverts, a hotel module with a map and prices on it, the OTAs' own pages, and then, some way down, the hotels' own sites. Which of those they click decides whether the booking costs you nothing or 15 to 25 per cent. This guide is about the search results page for a hotel, who wins each part of it, and what an independent property can do about each one.

What a search for "hotel in Llangollen" actually returns

Type it into a phone and look. At the top there are usually two or three text adverts, and most of them are Booking.com, Expedia or Hotels.com bidding on your town. Under those sits the hotel module: a map with pins, a list of properties, and a price next to each one for the dates Google has guessed. That module is built from Google's own hotel index, which is fed by Business Profiles and by Hotel Center, and the price next to your name comes either from an OTA or, if you have set it up, from your own booking engine. Then come the ordinary results, and on a generic search they are almost all aggregators: Booking.com's "10 best hotels in Llangollen" page, Tripadvisor, Expedia, sometimes the tourism board. An independent hotel's homepage appears on the first page for its own name and rarely for the generic search.

That is not a failure of your website. Booking.com has spent twenty years and a great deal of money earning links to a page for every town in Britain. Competing with it for "hotel in Llangollen" with a twelve-room property is not a plan, and anyone who sells you one is selling you a year of invoices.

The search that pays is the one with your name in it

When someone types your property's name, Google shows the knowledge panel: photos, the rating, amenities, check-in time, and a price list for the dates they choose. If your booking engine or your Business Profile feeds a rate to Google, the list includes an entry labelled with your own website, and clicking it lands on your booking page at no commission. If it does not, the list is OTAs only, and a guest who found you by name, perhaps because a friend recommended you, books through Booking.com because that was the first bookable link on the screen. Open your OTA extranet and look at how many of last month's reservations were from people who already knew your name. That is the commission you can stop paying first.

Cornell's School of Hotel Administration has published research on the "billboard effect": being listed on an OTA lifts a property's direct bookings, because people see it there and then search for it by name. The effect only works if there is a direct path to find. A knowledge panel with no official rate in it hands the billboard's traffic straight back to the OTA.

The doors, who wins them, and what each booking costs

The specific searches are yours for the taking

Guests do not only search for "hotel in". They search for the thing they need: a room that takes a dog, parking in a city centre, a family room for five, a pub with rooms on a walking route, a cottage that sleeps eight near a wedding venue, somewhere quiet with a bath. Booking.com has a filter for some of these and a page for none of them. A page on your site that answers one of those searches for your area, with real photos, the answer in the first paragraph and a rate on the page, ranks for it within a few months and keeps ranking. Most independents have never built these pages, and neither have the properties next door, which is why the ground is empty.

The order that works

1. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile and the hotel listing: category, class, check-in and check-out, every true amenity, photos in Google's categories, the official website link. This is a day's work and it changes what the knowledge panel and the hotel module show.
2. Get your own rate into the price list. Either your booking engine connects to Google Hotel Center, or you enter rates by hand in the profile. Until this is done, every name search is an OTA booking.
3. Build pages for the specific searches: each room type, each offer, each season, the dog, the parking, the wedding venue up the road, the trail that passes the door.
4. Run a review routine across Google, Tripadvisor and the booking engine, and reply to every review, because the next guest reads the replies.
5. Measure three things a month: Search Console for what showed and what was clicked, the booking engine's source report, and OTA share of room nights from the property management system.

A test you can do tonight: search your property's name in a private browser window and open the price list in the knowledge panel. If there is no entry for your own website, every guest who finds you by name is being sold to an OTA, and that is the first thing to fix.

How long each door takes

Listing corrections show within days. A rate feed appears in the price list within a week of the connection being approved. New pages take three to six months to settle, which is why a seasonal page has to be live before the booking window opens, not before the season. Reviews compound as long as you keep asking. Anyone promising the top of the hotel module in thirty days is describing what happens when a listing was badly wrong and gets fixed, which is real, but it is not what they will do in month two.