New Free Booking Links from Trivago

Trivago has launched Free Booking Links to help independent hotels benefit for free from the visibility and traffic generated by its metasearch engine.

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If you manage the direct channel of an independent hotel, you now have the opportunity to test for free the potential of trivago as a lever to grow your direct channel.

trivago has launched Free Booking Links to help independent hotels benefit from the visibility and traffic generated by its metasearch engine completely free of charge.

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ROIBACK, PREFERRED PARTNER OF TRIVAGO

Roiback customers, trivago's preferred partner, can now start testing the Free Booking Links functionality through our direct integration.

In order to demonstrate the potential in both visibility and conversions of paid campaigns and to boost bookings on the hotel's own website, trivago has opened the possibility for selected connectivity partners, such as Roiback, to activate the free links for their customers.

This new feature is currently available in five markets: United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy and France, although new markets are expected to be added gradually.

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ENHANCING THE DIRECT CHANNEL

Historically, it has been the OTAs that have taken advantage of the visibility generated by metasearch engines to increase mediated bookings to the detriment of the direct channel.

With this move, trivago will boost the direct channel for hotels as the free functionality is not available to OTAs. Only independent hotels will be able to make use of it.

Free Booking Links are no different from paid ads and will appear in the drop down section of the search results list, below the third position, although if the hotel website has the lowest price it will be guaranteed this third place with great impact which is the position where trivago always publishes the best price available.

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WHAT'S THE CATCH?

Initially, the functionality was limited to only one year, although Trivago has finally decided to keep the Free Booking Links on an unlimited basis so that hotels can test its potential, allowing them to stop the campaign or switch to the paid format at any time to increase the potential of this channel when they see fit.

Unlike Google Hotel Ads, trivago uses the same "slot" (space) for both free and paid ads and therefore both cannot coexist, i.e. trivago's Free Booking Links will only be available for those hotels that do not have active paid campaigns.

In this way, the metasearch engine makes a strong bet on the understanding that once the first results arrive and they see the potential for direct sales, hotels will activate Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) campaigns, which obviously have greater visibility and capacity to generate traffic and bookings.

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SO, SHOULD I STOP MY PAID CAMPAIGNS AND SWITCH TO THE FREE FORMAT?

If a hotel already has active paid campaigns or plans to activate them, we do not recommend replacing them with Free Booking Links since the visibility of the free ads is much lower and you will lose traffic and bookings.

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Our team of metasearch specialists works tirelessly to achieve incremental bookings by adjusting investment strategies and minimizing the cost of our clients' campaigns.

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Free Booking Links are a way to test trivago's booking generating potential and see how, with the right pricing and availability strategy, the direct channel is an important source of more profitable bookings.

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In summary, the main advantages provided by trivago's Free Booking Links are:

• A new and free solution to generate traffic and direct bookings, more profitable than intermediated bookings.
• Increase the hotel's brand visibility Gain autonomy in the control of prices and content published on trivago
• Compete directly with OTAs, reducing dependence on them
• Offer personalized services or upsellings to customers by directing them to the hotel's website.

If you are interested in receiving more information or activating these Free Booking Links from trivago, please contact your DCS directly.

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