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Accelerator: maximise hotel bookings when you need them most

Learn how Accelerator—our pay-per-stay visibility boosting tool—can support
your hotel booking optimisation strategy.

28 February 2024

Hotels Marketing strategy Revenue performance Advertising

Travellers have endless choices, consuming more than 141 pages of travel content in the 45 days before booking a trip.¹ But despite looking at all this content, most consumers only look at one to four search results pages on travel booking sites before booking.²

 

Every day, millions of travellers shop and book across our travel brands and vast B2B partner network. How can you ensure your hotel is positioned to capture their attention when you need it most?

 

When you need to quickly drive bookings for key stay dates, Accelerator is an easy-to-use and cost-effective tool for boosting your visibility in search results. Let’s dig into how Accelerator can help drive bookings and revenue growth for you.

Accelerator is our pay-per-stay visibility boosting tool for hotels.

Quickly and easily reach high-value travellers

When you list your properties with Expedia Group™, you’re not only reaching travellers shopping with our brands, you’re also reaching travellers across our B2B partner network, which includes nearly 60,000 businesses around the globe—including 37,000 offline travel agencies, many large airlines and financial institutions, and the biggest corporate travel agencies in the world.³ You’re more likely to reach guests you wouldn’t reach on your own: those who book weekend getaways, travel mid-week for work or fill rooms during shoulder season. You’ll also attract travellers who typically spend 18% more per night and 21% more on property.⁴

 

When you launch an Accelerator, the boosted visibility makes it easier for our highly engaged travellers to find and book your property, leading to higher click-through rates and more bookings.

 

The value of this increased visibility with travellers paid off for Karine Houde, General Manager, Le Capitole Hôtel: ‘Using the Accelerator tool in Partner Central has made it easy for me to increase my hotel listing’s visibility during slower times of year’.

Le Capitole Hôtel’s Accelerator drove a 275% increase in search impressions and page views, enabling them to reach more travellers and capture more net room nights.⁵

Le Capitole Hôtel used an Accelerator to reach more travellers and capture more net room nights during slower times of the year.

Avoid upfront costs with a budget-friendly, pay-per-stay model

As a pay-per-stay tool, Accelerator lets you only pay your selected additional compensation when a traveller books and stays with you, so you can use Accelerator without any upfront costs. This makes it an ideal option for anyone looking to experiment with revenue performance in a low-risk environment. It’s also an effective marketing strategy for smaller properties trying to keep up with larger chain hotels.

 

Rather than having to set budget aside to acquire more guests throughout the year or during a specific season, you can launch an Accelerator when you need to fill rooms. You can also start, stop and adjust your Accelerator at any time—you’re in full control.

 

Another benefit is that the tool enables you to enhance your visibility without offering a discount, helping to protect your traveller-facing rates.  

Spend less time trying to fill your rooms

The tool is simple and easy to use—with just a few clicks, you can set up and stop an Accelerator at any time. This was a key benefit for Alejandro Velazquez, e-commerce Manager, Dreams Jade Resort & Spa, Cancún, Mexico: ‘It’s great because we see results right away. Accelerator is easy to use: We can turn it on and turn it off, it’s flexible and it’s easy to create new ones’.

Using Accelerator, Dreams Jade Resort & Spa achieved an 82% increase in page views and a 64% increase in impressions.⁴

We use your existing property content and payment processes during set-up, so there’s no need to write custom copy or add images. That’s because Accelerator boosts the position of your existing organic listing, ensuring your listing is more visible to potential guests. This means you can spend less time thinking about filling rooms and more time engaging with your valuable guests.

The ability to turn an Accelerator on and off at any time was appealing to Dreams Jade Resort & Spa in Cancún, Mexico, who successfully used the tool to increase page views and impressions.

How it works

Based on your goals and your property’s unique needs, you decide when you want to use Accelerator to boost your property’s visibility.

1. Choose your dates

You can target specific periods to run your Accelerator or set it as an ongoing, always-on visibility booster.

 

Pro tip: select dates where your occupancy is the lowest or when you expect there to be a lull in rooms booked, like off-season or mid-week. The tool will also provide you with suggestions for the most effective dates to use an Accelerator. Using Accelerator to target these dates can help you optimise visibility with travellers when you need it most. 

2. Select a compensation level

The pay-per-stay model is customisable and allows you to preview the potential impact on your sort order and predicted results before you commit.

 

We’ll automatically reconcile bookings at your selected compensation level and pay you the same way we normally do—no extra steps required. 

 

Pro tip: use a compensation amount that fits your business’s needs and goals. The preview tool can help you better understand how different amounts can impact your position in the search results.

You can preview the potential impact on your sort order and predicted results before you commit to an Accelerator.
3. Launch

After you select the targeted dates and compensation level, your Accelerator is ready to launch. Once it’s live, you can use analytics reporting to track performance—such as net room nights, gross booking value, page views and search impressions—and optimise your marketing strategy for better results.

 

Need to get your property in front of travellers quickly? Set up and launch an Accelerator today. 

Take action

Log in to Partner Central and set up an Accelerator to start reaching more travellers with our pay-per-stay tool.
Set up now

Boost your performance

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