Overbooked: Hotel Marketing & Direct Bookings

HotelHottubs.com
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Marketing

Most hotel marketing advice is written for hotels that have a marketing department. Overbooked is for the rest of us, the independents, the boutiques, the forty-room places where the person doing the marketing is also covering the front desk at eleven at night. Shawn has spent twenty-five years in hospitality, most of it in Dallas, watching properties spend real money on marketing that does nothing. Each episode, he sits down with someone who’s actually moved the number: operators, marketers, and the occasional outsider who wandered in from another industry and noticed something everyone else had stopped seeing. What we get into • Direct bookings, and what OTA commission really costs once you price in the discount you gave to win the guest back • Hotel SEO — why you rank below the big travel sites for your own property’s name • The searches guests actually type, and why almost none of them are “boutique hotel near me” • Amenity data, photography, and the parts of your listing nobody has audited since 2019 • What a small property should actually spend, from people who’ve spent it No vendor pitch dressed up as an interview. When something doesn’t work, we say so. Brought to you by https://hotelhottubs.com/ and yes, occasionally by its founder, who you’ll hear argue with the host.

Episodes

  1. Sep 6

    How HotelHottubs.com Found the Search OTAs Can't Answer

    Your guest searches for a hot tub in the room. The hotel next door ticks the same box for a jacuzzi by the pool. Nobody can tell them apart — and that gap is worth money. This is the problem that Ross is trying to solve at hotelhottubs.com Shawn spent twenty-five years in hospitality watching properties pour money into marketing that did nothing. Ross spent nine years in big tech moving numbers by a tenth of a percent, then fixed a sixteen-room hotel's website before lunch and never went back. In the first episode of The Underbooked, they take apart the searches guests actually type — and why the biggest travel sites in the world are structurally unable to answer them. It isn't that the OTAs are stupid. It's that the cost of being specific is higher for them than it is for you. In this episode:• Why "nestled in the heart of the historic district" has never been searched by a human being• The photograph you should be taking instead of the one you paid four thousand dollars for• What OTA commission actually costs once you count the discount, the loyalty credit and the staff time• Why one amenity checkbox creates a refund, a bad review and a front-desk argument on someone's anniversary• The three things to stop doing tomorrow — and the one page to write instead Shawn and Ross disagree three times, and none of it gets tidied up. Brought to you by Hotel Hot Tubs — which is also Ross's company, so take the endorsement accordingly.

    How HotelHottubs.com Found the Search OTAs Can't Answer
  • 1 Episode

About

Most hotel marketing advice is written for hotels that have a marketing department. Overbooked is for the rest of us, the independents, the boutiques, the forty-room places where the person doing the marketing is also covering the front desk at eleven at night. Shawn has spent twenty-five years in hospitality, most of it in Dallas, watching properties spend real money on marketing that does nothing. Each episode, he sits down with someone who’s actually moved the number: operators, marketers, and the occasional outsider who wandered in from another industry and noticed something everyone else had stopped seeing. What we get into • Direct bookings, and what OTA commission really costs once you price in the discount you gave to win the guest back • Hotel SEO — why you rank below the big travel sites for your own property’s name • The searches guests actually type, and why almost none of them are “boutique hotel near me” • Amenity data, photography, and the parts of your listing nobody has audited since 2019 • What a small property should actually spend, from people who’ve spent it No vendor pitch dressed up as an interview. When something doesn’t work, we say so. Brought to you by https://hotelhottubs.com/ and yes, occasionally by its founder, who you’ll hear argue with the host.

Information