New Free Booking Links from Trivago

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

​

​

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

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

​

ROIBACK, PREFERRED PARTNER OF TRIVAGO

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

With the aim of demonstrating the potential in both visibility and conversions of paid campaigns and boosting bookings on the hotel's own website, trivago has opened the possibility for selected connectivity partners, such as Roiback, to activate free links for their clients.

Currently, this new function is available in five markets: United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy and France, although new markets are expected to be included gradually.

​

BOOSTING THE DIRECT CHANNEL

Historically, OTAs have taken advantage of the visibility generated by metasearch engines to increase intermediated bookings to the detriment of the direct channel.

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

Free Booking Links do not differ from paid ads and will appear in the drop-down section of the search results list, below the third position, although if the hotel's website has the lowest price, this third place with great impact will be guaranteed, which is the position in which trivago always publishes the best available price.

​

WHERE IS THE CATCH?

Initially, the functionality was limited to only one year, although Trivago has finally decided to maintain the Free Booking Links indefinitely so that hotels can check their potential, allowing them to stop the campaign or change to the payment 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, that is, trivago's Free Booking Links will only be available to those hotels that do not have active paid campaigns.

In this way, the metasearch engine makes a strong bet, understanding that once the first results arrive and they see the potential for direct sales, hotels will activate pay-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) campaigns that obviously have greater visibility and capacity to generate traffic and reservations.

​

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 free ads is much lower and traffic and reservations will be lost.

​

Our team of metasearch specialists works tirelessly to obtain incremental reservations, adjusting investment strategies and reducing the cost of our clients' campaigns to a minimum.

​

Free Booking Links are a way to test the reservation-generating potential of trivago and verify how, with an adequate pricing and availability strategy, the direct channel is an important source of more profitable reservations.

​

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

• A new and free solution to generate traffic and direct bookings, more profitable than intermediated ones.
• Increase the hotel's brand visibility Gain autonomy in the control of prices and content published on trivago
• Compete directly with OTAs, reducing their dependence
• Offer personalized services or upsells 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, contact your DCS directly.

​