Increasing Direct Bookings with Metasearch - Getting Started with Trivago

Travel planning for most people begin online. With a significant shift in traveller’s behaviour and expectations, hotels can no longer afford to take any risks when it comes to online visibility. With direct booking taking a momentum after the pandemic, metasearch has emerged as an important tool for hotels to attract guests to their website.

What is Trivago?

With more than 95 million unique monthly visitors and an average of 70% viewability, Trivago is one of the largest metasearch engines for hotels. It processes 4 million search results per day comparing 900000+ hotels information and pricing. An up-to-date profile on Trivago helps with appearance and makes a hotel stand out in its own ways, capturing maximum travellers attention.

It acts as a price aggregator where hotel room prices from various travel sites are shown, when a user searches for accommodation.

Why do hotels need to be on Trivago?

75% of hoteliers using Trivago have claimed it to be a relevant marketing channel for their hotels.

• Trivago offers a platform to make an impression to your potential guests and attract them to your brand site for direct booking.
• You can compete with OTAs by advertising your direct rates and save on booking commissions.
• A property with a booking engine integrated with Trivago can receive direct bookings on its website while owning guest information.

Register your property on Trivago for Free!

• Get started by creating your profile on Trivago Business Studio.
• Enter your details like name, contact number, email address to create your profile.
• Once the profile is ready, enter the name of the property in the search box to claim your listing and you are ready to go!

The best part of listing on Trivago is that it follows the same process for registering any property: independent hotels / guest house / B&B / hotel groups or any other kind of accommodation. Plus, you can also claim and manage multiple properties from a single Trivago account.

What is Trivago Business Studio?

Trivago offers a marketing platform for independent hotels called “Business Studio”. It currently operates in 12 languages across 22 local platforms around the world.

This platform provides a number of apps to help manage profile’s content, monitor online marketing performance, track online reputation, analytics and promotions – with no charges or commissions.

The key benefits of using Trivago Business Studio are:

• Make hotel profile management on Trivago easy and simple.
• Increase your digital visibility by making Trivago your online marketing channel.
• Monitor your online reputation by tracking ratings and reviews via “Guest rating app”.

According to Trivago’s research, 75% of registered hoteliers who regularly use Trivago Business Studio find Trivago to be a relevant marketing channel for their property.

How Does Trivago work?

In simple terms, Trivago works on an e-commerce business model where the company provides services to the travellers via internet.

Most people picture Trivago as a platform that works with various booking sites including OTAs, hotel websites, along with hotel chains and groups comparing millions of accommodation deals to provide visitors the best match for their needs. But, it is a lot more than this.

This extensive company operates under 3 different business models:

Aggregator business model

Trivago works as an aggregator by collecting data of different suppliers including hotels, car rental services, flights, etc. Under this model, Trivago works by processing and fine-tuning the data collected to bring value out of it.

Categorizing the data under location, region, rates, and other criteria - Trivago presents it to the end user to assist them plan their travel.

Advertiser business model

This model is the main source of revenue for Trivago. The company operates on the “Cost per Click” mechanism. Though listing your property on Trivago is 100% free, but simply listing it won’t help you get bookings. To get bookings, your hotel must be ranking on top few positions and this calls for running ads.

Trivago charges the hoteliers every time a user clicks on the advertisement. Displaying the best possible rate, it helps the hotel make its presence on the highest click-through-rate, increases the chance of receiving a booking and brings in revenue to both the hotels and its own channel.

Subscriber business model

This model of Trivago is for the Pro business users who agree to pay a subscription fee to avail the advanced features of the Business Studio. The PRO features help the hotels compete better with the likes and rankings of the property on popular Online Travel Agencies like Booking.com, Agoda, MakeMyTrip, etc.

The company claims that the hotels using the PRO package experiences 21% more clicks and 45% increased bookings in comparison to regular users.

Apart from this, Trivago also provides subscribers to showcase their listings through display advertising. The branded messages appear across trivago. Many properties use this feature to increase awareness and highlight special offers.

What is Trivago Rate Connect

With 500,000+ properties listed, Trivago’s business model provides your hotel a competitive edge over competitors with exclusive data, advanced marketing features and Rate Connect.

Trivago developed Rate Connect, an app that enables you to list your website rates directly on Trivago and pull in direct bookings via your hotel’s website.

All your hotel needs to have is a booking engine and a connectivity partner to be eligible to use this perfect blend of direct and indirect booking via Rate Connect.

Article written by RateTiger, an HotelMinder Expert Partner.