As health signals steadily improve, we see consumers are reapproaching the idea of travel. For example, searches for "can I travel" grew globally by over 800% YoY.1
At Google Marketing Livestream, we shared our focus areas as we anticipate travel reopening in parts of the world, highlighting three new products to help our partners capture pent up demand: vacation rentals in Hotel results, hotel booking extensions in text ads, and enhancements to commissions (per stay) bidding. Learn more about these updates below.
Helping travelers find more options with vacation rentals
We’ve seen increased interest in smaller, local destinations and vacation rentals, where people felt they had more control over their surroundings and safety: Google searches for “beach rentals” and “staycations” grew by over +100% globally since last year.2
As users decide on their choice of accommodations, we’ll begin showing vacation rental listings within the Hotel results page for a given destination.
Extending Hotel Ads feed data to text ads with hotel booking extensions
We recently introduced hotel booking extensions, which automatically surfaces Hotel Ads feed data within Search text ads extensions.
Information like landing page, hotel, price, and availability are all pulled from your existing feed, and used in your Search campaigns to make them more relevant and helpful.
We’ll begin showing this experience for travel advertisers currently part of the allowlist, and will open it up more broadly in the coming weeks.
Driving performance with updates to commissions (per stay)
To address the unique challenges of the pandemic and unpredictable travel booking patterns, earlier last year, we introduced commissions (per stay), which eliminates the risk associated with cancellations. Travel advertisers only pay per consumed stay.
Now, we’re introducing new ways to make commission (per stay) easier than ever to use:
- You told us reconciliation has been tough. Now, we’re providing a per-booking report in Google Ads, where you review the bookings and tell us which were canceled, and which were stayed. With improved reporting, you can now also easily see your post-cancellation performance metrics.
- Later in the year, we will also be introducing bid adjustment support for commission (per stay) campaigns, so that you can adjust your commission rates by dimensions like check-in day of week or stay date to account for your room inventory.
- Lastly, we will be enabling credit card billing and additional currency support, so that you can pay for your completed guest stays however it best suits your business.
Together with your expertise and quality data, and our technology and scale, we can bring your customers helpful and comprehensive travel experiences wherever they’re searching across Google.
To learn even more about how to get started bringing your hotel business online, check out our Grow With Google recorded webinar.
Posted by Michael Trauttmansdorff, Director of Product Management, Travel Ads
1. Google Data, Global English, Jun 3, 2020 - Aug 1, 2020 vs Jun 3, 2019 - Aug 1, 2020
2. Google Data, Global English, May 20, 2020 - Jul 18, 2020 vs May 20, 2019 - Jul 18, 2019
