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Hospitality marketing

The guest found you on Booking.com, and you paid for the privilege

Sidekicks runs marketing for boutique hotels and venues. We start with direct bookings, because every reservation that arrives through an online travel agency costs you a commission you never see on the invoice. If the calendar rather than the commission is the problem, tell us and we can start there.

The commission is not the whole problem. The bigger one is that the guest is now theirs. Their remarketing, their loyalty program, their email list, and their next recommendation.

Where the money goes
Booked through an OTACommission on every stay
Booked directYours, and so is the guest
The gapThe commission, plus the guest

Most boutique properties we meet have never measured which is which. That is normal, and it is the first thing worth fixing, because everything after it is guesswork.

On this page
01Direct bookings
02Being found
03The rest of it
04Your side
05Pricing
06Questions
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The mechanism

The booking you already earned, taken back

Almost nobody books the first place they see. They find you on an aggregator, then they open a new tab and search your name, because they want to see the rooms properly and check whether booking direct is cheaper.

That search is the moment. If what they find is a slow site, a booking engine that asks for too much, or a rate that looks worse than the one they just left, they go back and you pay the commission on a guest who was already sold.

01Your name gets searched after they find you elsewhere. That traffic already exists and most properties are not measuring it.
02What they land on has to load fast on a phone, because they are usually looking at it in bed.
03The direct rate has to be visibly the better deal, or the comparison ends badly.
04Booking has to take fewer steps than the aggregator, not more.
05Once they have stayed, the follow-up belongs to you rather than to a platform.

None of that is clever. It is the same funnel work an ecommerce store does, applied to a room instead of a product, and most properties have never had anyone do it.

Local and brand search

Two kinds of search, two different jobs

Brand searchhighest intent

Somebody typing your property name is the highest-intent traffic you will ever get, and it is the traffic most likely to be intercepted. Aggregators bid on your name. Your own listing, your own site, and your own rate need to win that page.

Local and discoveryslower work

Somebody searching for a place to stay in your area, or a venue for a wedding, has not chosen yet. That is where the Google Business Profile, the photography, and the reviews do most of the lifting.

Your Google Business Profile is the single most looked at page about your property and it is usually two years out of date. Hours, photos, amenities, questions answered, reviews responded to. It costs nothing and almost nobody keeps it current.

The rest of it

What else we run

Paid

Meta and Google, aimed at the dates you need filled rather than at a flat monthly spend. Midweek, shoulder season, and the gaps in the calendar that a flat campaign never targets.

Email

Past guests are the cheapest bookings available and most properties never contact them again. Pre-arrival, post-stay, and the seasonal note that fills a quiet week.

Content

Photography and video that matches what the stay actually feels like. The gap between the photos and the room is the most common complaint in hospitality reviews, and it is a marketing problem before it is an operations one.

Venue and events

Where the property does weddings, functions, or corporate events, that is a separate audience with a separate inquiry path. It usually deserves its own campaign and its own follow-up.

Your side

What we need from you

Access to the booking engine numbers and to the Google Business Profile. Beyond that, very little, and we can work with whoever manages them if it is not you.

We need to know what your rate parity agreements allow, because that decides how aggressively the direct rate can be positioned, and it is the one constraint we cannot work around by being clever.

You are not writing anything, you are not managing a calendar, and you are not learning software.

Pricing

What it costs

One channel
From $1,800
a month, plus one-time setup
A connected program
From $3,500
a month, two channels

Six month minimum. Direct booking work compounds, and the first two months are mostly measurement, so a shorter engagement ends before the numbers mean anything.

Before you ask

Common questions

01What it costs
02OTA commission
03Rate parity
04Booking engine
05Venues
06Time to bookings
07Who does the work
08Account ownership
What does hospitality marketing cost?

It starts at $1,800 a month for a single channel and $3,500 for a connected program across two. Setup is a one-time fee that depends on the channel. Full pricing is published rather than quoted on a call.

Can you actually reduce our OTA commission?

We can shift the mix. Aggregators are a legitimate acquisition channel and the goal is not to leave them, it is to stop paying commission on guests who would have booked direct if the direct path had been easier. The measurement comes first, because most properties do not know their current split.

What about rate parity?

It constrains what we can advertise and it does not stop the work. Parity agreements usually govern the room rate rather than what else you can include, so the direct offer becomes the thing the aggregator cannot match. We will look at your agreements before recommending anything.

Do you work with our booking engine?

We work around whichever one you have. If the booking engine itself is the reason people abandon, we will tell you, but replacing it is a separate project and not one we would open with.

We are a venue rather than a hotel. Does this apply?

Mostly. Event inquiries behave more like catering leads than like room bookings, meaning the speed of the response matters more than the funnel does. The work shifts accordingly.

How long before this shows up in bookings?

Brand search work moves fastest, often inside a couple of months, because that traffic already exists and is simply being lost. Discovery search is slower. Paid depends on how much of your calendar needs filling and when.

Who actually does the work?

The same two people throughout. Jeremy runs the relationship and the day to day, and Jimmy runs the strategy and checks the work before it goes out.

Do we own the accounts?

Yes, in every case. Everything is built inside your accounts and you remove us the same way you added us.

Two business days, no cost

Start with a free review

We look at your booking path from the outside, the way a guest would, and come back with what is sending people back to the aggregator. Two business days, no account access, and the findings are yours whether or not you hire us.

Get a free review