For years, online travel agencies (OTAs) have been a necessary part of the hotel distribution mix. They provide visibility, but at a steep cost—charging 15-25% per booking while owning the guest relationship, marketing data, and future loyalty opportunities. You’ve likely invested heavily in direct booking strategies, but if metasearch isn’t a key part of your plan, you’re leaving money on the table.
With Google eliminating commission-based bidding and the industry shifting toward AI-driven performance marketing, the hotels that adapt their metasearch strategy now will gain a competitive edge, while those that hesitate will pay more in OTA commissions and acquisition costs.
Metasearch platforms let travelers compare hotel rates across multiple channels, including direct booking links and OTA listings.
But here’s the problem: OTAs actively bid against your brand name on metasearch platforms, ensuring their listings appear before yours. That means even when a traveler searches for your hotel, they often end up booking through an OTA instead of your website.
This results in:
A strong metasearch strategy lets you compete directly with OTAs, ensuring travelers see and book the hotel’s official direct rate instead.
For years, Google Hotel Ads’ Commissions (Per Stay) and Commissions (Per Conversion) models provided a low-risk way for hotels to bid on metasearch—only paying for bookings once a guest completed their stay.
But Google removed these commission models, forcing you to switch to:
This means:
Without a well-executed transition strategy, you risk losing visibility and control—leading to more OTA bookings and higher acquisition costs.
While Google eliminated commission-based bidding, Sojern continues to offer commission-based metasearch solutions, allowing hotels to pay only for completed stays—not clicks.
For hotels that have relied on Google’s commission model, we provide a seamless transition, ensuring you:
Many hotels focus only on Google Hotel Ads, but travelers research across multiple platforms. If you’re not present on Tripadvisor, Trivago, KAYAK, Skyscanner, Bing, and Wego, you’re losing direct bookings to OTAs that are bidding there.
A multi-platform strategy ensures:
Hotels that advertise on multiple metasearch platforms see higher conversion rates and lower cost-per-acquisition.
If you’re shifting to CPC bidding, manually adjusting bids across multiple platforms is time-consuming and inefficient. AI-powered automation ensures you’re bidding smarter, not harder.
Our machine learning algorithms analyze:
With over 70,000 real-time predictions per second, our AI-powered metasearch solution optimizes performance and reduces wasted ad spend, so you can focus on strategy, not daily bid management.
Google’s Free Booking Links allow hotels to appear in organic search results, driving direct bookings without paid ads.
Unlike some metasearch providers that charge commission on these free bookings, we do not—ensuring you keep 100% of the revenue from these high-value placements.
Many hotels ignore this free opportunity—but it’s an essential part of a cost-effective direct booking strategy.
Metasearch doesn’t just drive direct bookings—it’s an essential tool for brand protection.
Hotels that don’t actively bid on metasearch risk:
With a well-optimized metasearch strategy, hotels can:
With Google’s commission model ending, hotels must pivot quickly—or risk losing direct revenue to OTAs.
We help hotels:
Hotels that act now will gain a competitive advantage—those that wait will see higher acquisition costs and more reliance on OTAs.
Metasearch is no longer optional—it’s the foundation of a profitable direct booking strategy. Are you ready to take control of your metasearch performance?
Let’s chat to help you develop a cost-effective, high-ROI metasearch strategy tailored to your hotel’s needs.
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