Choose a hotel marketing agency by checking who owns the ad accounts, how they attribute bookings, and what their fee model rewards. Insist on ownership of every account, ask them to explain their attribution model in plain language, and be careful with fees based on a percentage of ad spend. Start with a defined three month scope before a long contract.
Every advertising account, analytics property and search console profile should be created under the hotel's own ownership, with the agency granted access. This is a five minute setup at the start and an expensive dispute at the end. Historical campaign data is an asset that stays with you.
The same applies to creative and to any landing pages built for campaigns. If the agency hosts them on their own domain, that traffic and its history leave with them.
Ask how they know a booking came from their work. If the answer is a platform's own reported conversions, remember that every platform claims the same booking. Cross check reported bookings against what actually landed in your PMS for the same period.
Metasearch and brand search are where inflated claims concentrate, because both intercept guests who were already coming to you. A good agency will acknowledge this and talk about incremental bookings. A weak one will present total assisted conversions as if all of it were new business.
Skip the research, talk to someone who has done it 45 minutes with an independent specialist. Free for hotels, no pitch, no commissions. Book a free session →A fee that is a percentage of advertising spend rewards more spend. A flat retainer rewards efficiency but can drift into minimal effort. A OTA or travel agency, for delivering the reservation. It is the dominant cost of third-party distri">commission on attributed bookings sounds aligned and depends entirely on the attribution model, which brings you back to the previous question.
None of these is wrong by itself. What matters is that you can see the incentive clearly and set a check against it, such as a monthly review of cost per booking rather than of impressions and clicks.
Guaranteed first position in search results, a guaranteed number of bookings, or a promise to remove negative reviews. None of these is within an agency's control, and the last is against the terms of the major review platforms. An honest agency talks about ranges, tests and what it will stop doing if a channel underperforms.
Start small. A defined three month engagement with one metric and a clear scope tells you more than any reference call, and it costs less than discovering the mismatch in month nine of a twelve month contract.
It depends on whether OTAs and metasearch are bidding on it in your market and how strong your organic presence is. In competitive markets brand bidding defends bookings that would otherwise be intercepted. In quieter ones it can pay for traffic you would have received anyway. Test by pausing and measuring.
Enough to gather signal in a defined period rather than a fixed figure. Spreading a small budget across search, social and metasearch simultaneously produces data too thin to learn from. Concentrating it on one channel for a full quarter tells you something usable.
An agency brings tools and cross property experience without a salary commitment. An in house person understands the property and can act daily. Many hotels end up with a hybrid: internal ownership of strategy and content, external execution on paid channels.
Paid channels produce measurable data within weeks, though the first weeks are learning rather than performance. Organic search and content work in months. Any agency promising organic results in weeks is either describing paid activity or overstating what it can do.
Spend, bookings attributed, cost per direct booking on confirmed stays, and what changed since last month. Reports built around impressions and clicks describe activity rather than results, and they are the ones that survive longest without being questioned.
Not for a first engagement. A defined three month scope with one agreed metric tells you what a year of reference calls cannot. Agencies confident in their work generally accept it, and the ones that refuse have told you something useful.