Tripadvisor & its use of the Hotel’s Brand Subscribe

There have been some discussions among the Spanish hoteliers since Fitur 2008 regarding the use of the Hotel’s Brand by Tripadvisor with lucrative purposes.

It seems hoteliers, basically independent hotels, are worried about the use of their brand being made by third parties when adding no value to it. In fact they understand that OTA’s add value by enhancing distribution, but review sites like TripAdvisor where anyone can post a review (positive or negative) with no need to demonstrate that ever stayed at that particular hotel, has no added value, despite the importance of transparency for its founder.

I understand that Hotel Chains have the capability to promote themselves on Tripadvisor and generate relevant traffic to their Corporate Websites,but independent hotels are not given a chance to purchase sponsored Links at Tripadvisor.

Are the hotels loosing the control of their brand? In my opinion, major OTA’s bid on hotel brands at their search engine marketing campaigns, and dedicate resources on SEO for brand based keywords. OTA’s have the capability to bid on PPC campaigns at sites like Tripadvisor as well as metasearch engines. Independent hotels have no chance to generate traffic from this sources unless it is intermediated.

Of course a hotel can protect its brand from being used by third parties, but it will definitely impact revenues from OTA’s who, most likely, will penalty that hotel to non-priviledged positions.

I haven’t heard a discussion like this on the english travel blogosphere, and hope somebody will discuss about it.

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Comments

3 Responses to “Tripadvisor & its use of the Hotel’s Brand”

  1. Some concerns about Blogging and the Conversation : Thoughts on Hospitality Marketing and Distribution on March 6th, 2008 11:03 pm

    [...] If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Javier Garcia, started a Meme that consists in having Spanish travel bloggers posting about the reasons why TripAvisor should join the Conversation and discuss the issues that worry Spanish hoteliers. [...]

  2. Claude on April 12th, 2008 9:14 am

    It’s the war for the Travel Long Train.

    TripAdvisor, since the begining use the hotel brand and hotel name to go deep inside Google index and other search engine.

    unfortunatly, Independant hotel wake up too late as alwways ;-(

    Now, how you can battle with a web site with millions and millions page web…and more and more every days with the user generated content on the independant hotels…

    It”s like the GO game, they eat all the territories
    see wikipedia for GO game
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28board_game%29

    Well, if you have any idea to compensate this situation, tell us.

    Claude

  3. Claude on April 12th, 2008 9:46 am

    the ideas and answers are inside some GO strategies.

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