The Best Hotel Booking Sites to List Your Hotel in 2023

It's not easy to select the best hotel booking platform for listing your hotel. In 2023, the best hotel booking sites will be those that offer the most convenience and value for money. From online travel agencies (OTAs) to metasearch engines and even your own hotel's website, there is an abundance of resources available for listing your hotel rooms and deals. It can be difficult to sort through all these options to optimize your distribution strategy.

The ideal distribution strategy involves a combination of third party channels and optimizing your direct channel to maximize your revenue per booking. This means using third party sites to boost bookings and drive traffic back to your direct channels. By doing this, you get the most out of each booking while maintaining control over pricing and availability on your own website. To get the best results from your listings keep up with industry trends to stay ahead of the competition. Use this to offer customers the best rates and customer experience strategies.

{{blog-cta="/features/product-updates"}}

What are online booking platforms?

Hotel booking sites are a great way to list accommodation deals and drive bookings, especially during low season or when you need to fill up your hotel last minute. These websites give you more visibility and connect you to users who wouldn’t ordinarily find your hotel.

Why is online booking popular?

Online booking websites are popular as it speeds up guests' check-in process. Instead of filling out information forms and paying at the hotel, guests can just print out their online booking details and proceed to their reservation. Furthermore, it also helps hotels monitor the availability of their rooms, ensuring all guests would have an accommodation that suits their preferences.

What are the booking platforms for hospitality?

Hotel booking sites are a great way to list accommodation deals and drive bookings, especially during low season or when you need to fill up your hotel last minute. These websites give you more visibility and connect you to users who wouldn’t ordinarily find your hotel. There are many different types of hotel booking sites out there, from OTAs (Online Travel Agencies), cheap hotel booking sites, to metasearch engines and aggregators. To create the most effective distribution strategy for your hotel, consider these seven top hotel booking sites to list your property:

• Google Hotels
• Booking.com
• Agoda
• TripAdvisor
• Trivago
• Expedia
• Kayak

These seven websites offer a great combination of services to drive direct traffic to your own website as well as increase bookings through third-party sites. With these booking engines at your disposal, you can reach more customers and boost occupancy rates in no time!

Google Hotels

Google Hotels has already become the number one search engine for anyone looking to book a hotel. With its Google Maps integration, users can find hotels in their desired area with ease. Google Hotels is also price-forward, so it’s essential for hotels to offer competitive prices and deals if they want to appear in search results. To ensure your hotel appears in Google Hotels searches, make sure your Google My Business listing is updated and your map indicates an accurate location of your business. This will help you stand out from the competition and increase your chances of getting more bookings.

Google Hotels has become an invaluable tool for hotels looking to increase their bookings. By making sure your business information is accurate on Google My Business and offering competitive prices, you can take advantage of this metasearch engine and get more customers through the door. With its easy-to-use interface and location-based search capabilities, Google Hotels is an essential part of any hotel’s marketing strategy.

Find out how you can optimize your GMB profile here.

Booking.com

Booking.com is the leading booking site for finding hotels and affordable deals. It offers a wide range of hotels, BnBs, resorts, and private apartments to choose from, making it easy for guests to find the perfect accommodation. Booking puts a high emphasis on properties with high quality pictures, so ensure to list your property with exceptional imagery. You must maintain a fantastic star rating to maximize your booking. Learn how to write the best replies to Booking.com reviews in this blog article.

When it comes to commissions, Booking charges you based on the size of your property. This can be quite steep but it will pay for itself in the long run. Plus, Booking verifies all reviews, so you won’t have to worry about fake reviews that could potentially damage your reputation. All in all, Booking is an excellent choice for those looking to list their hotel deals online and get maximum exposure.

Agoda

Agoda is one of the most popular hotel booking websites, with an estimated global network of 2.7 million hotels and holiday properties worldwide. Aside from hotels, they also offer bookings for flights, long-term stays, and tourist activities. Furthermore, Agoda is considered one of the best hotel booking sites for Europe, with Italy, France, Spain, and Germany being its top global markets.

Is Agoda a legit booking site?

Yes. Agoda is a legitimate booking site that’s being used by numerous hotels and properties worldwide. All businesses partnering with Agoda are required to complete an account verification process to verify their legitimacy.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is an essential part of any distribution strategy for hotels. It is a great way to reach potential customers and build your brand's reputation. TripAdvisor reviews can make or break a hotel, so it is vital to manage your reputation carefully. The “click to book” function makes it even easier for customers to find and book your hotel directly from the site.

To ensure that your hotel appears higher in TripAdvisor’s search results, invest in advertising on TripAdvisor. Doing this will help you reach more potential customers and boost bookings. With careful management of reviews and strategic advertising, TripAdvisor can be a powerful tool for increasing visibility and boosting sales for your hotel.

{{blog-cta="/features/product-updates"}}

Trivago

Trivago is a powerful metasearch hotel booking site that is becoming increasingly valuable for independent hotels to improve their direct booking channels. With Trivago's Direct Connect integration, hotels can drive direct bookings to their own website, run cost-per-click marketing campaigns, and publish website rates on their hotel profile. This functionality is something that many of the other sites listed also offer and is one of Trivago’s key value propositions.

The Direct Connect integration allows hotels to gain more control over their online presence and better manage their direct bookings. It also provides them with access to valuable data about how customers are searching for and booking rooms at their hotels. You can use this data to optimize your pricing strategies and ensure that you always offer competitive rates and top-tier customer service. By running cost-per-click campaigns through Trivago, hotels can amplify their reach and get in front of new customers who may not have found them otherwise.

Is Trivago and Expedia the same?

Trivago is a website run by Expedia company. Most of its offers are focused on USA and Europe. Its top listings include properties in Rome, Panama City Beach, Barcelona, San Diego, and Nashville.

Expedia

Expedia is an important player in the online hotel booking space. It is one of the largest travel sites in the world and users can find an extensive list of accommodation choices. Expedia has a loyalty program, rewarding customers with points for every booking they make on the site. Customers use these points to get discounts on future bookings.

Expedia also offers hotels access to its Expedia Partner Central platform. This platform lets hotels manage their own rates and availability. This gives you more control over how you are represented on Expedia and helps you to maximize your revenue potential. Plus, Expedia has a wide range of marketing tools so you can drive as much traffic as possible!

Is Expedia legit for hotels?

Yes. Expedia is a legitimate online travel agency. It also manages numerous travel metasearch engines such as Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Orbitz, and CheapTickets, which offer various travel deals.

Kayak

Kayak is a popular website that makes it easy for users to find the best deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars. The website has a clean and intuitive design so users can seamlessly compare prices and availability in real time. Hotels can connect to Kayak via other booking engines to show their prices and availability in real-time and allow users to book online. You should have competitive rates to get listed on Kayak so that you appear first when users filter by price. You must be upfront about any fees associated with your accommodation so customers don't feel misled or taken advantage of. Reviews are also a crucial factor as they help customers make informed decisions about which hotel to choose. Hotels with higher ratings will appear as “recommended” which allows them to appear higher up in the search results.

How do I get more online bookings?

The key to getting more online bookings is by building your online reputation across booking platforms. To do this, you can start by optimizing your profiles by updating your business information, creating engaging content, and responding to online reviews.

A quick and professional response to reviews can have a great impact on customers’ decisions when selecting a hotel, so it is important for hotels to prioritize reviews. Learn more about the importance of responding to reviews individually in this blog.

Use MARA AI for quick review management

Responding to online reviews across all these websites can be a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be with our AI Review Assistant of MARA. This intuitive tool is designed to ease your Online Reputation Management process, making it more efficient, personalized, and time-saving. It offers the best and most personalized AI for responding to and analyzing your guest reviews.

Centralized Review Inbox for major online review websites

One of the key features of this tool is the AI-powered Review Inbox that allows you to streamline all reviews across all your online listings. Your review inbox makes responding to reviews as simple as hitting "Generate reply" and clicking "Send". The Review Inbox connects to multiple review sources, including Google, Booking.com, and Tripadvisor, giving you a panoramic view of all your reviews. And you can even configure review response automation: Why not allow MARA to automatically respond to simple reviews, like 5-star Google reviews with no text, ensuring you never miss a review? Daily notifications about new reviews keep you updated and in control.

Uncomplicated Review Analytics

Regardless of the number of active listings you maintain across various review websites, the inability to extract valuable guest insights from your reviews can significantly limit the potential benefits. Without effectively mining these insights, you miss out on opportunities to optimize your operations and enhance guest satisfaction.

To help you understand and analyze the multitude of reviews, the Review Assistant also incorporates Review Analytics. This provides actionable, easy-to-understand insights that are tailored exclusively to your business. With MARA, you can quickly get the gist of all your reviews without needing to read each one. The analysis is so detailed that you can find out about specific issues like "water in the pool is too cold" or "lack of vegan breakfast option”. These insights help optimize guest experience without requiring you to be a data expert.

Streamlined Review Automation

The key to managing multiple listings across all these websites is to automate the process, a task easily accomplished with MARA.

After gaining trust in your personal AI Review Assistant, you can even go on autopilot and create automation rules. This way, you can specify which reviews should be replied by the AI directly with no additional approval. With the configuration below, all Google reviews with no text and a star rating of 4 and above are answered automatically.

The most personal response AI

MARA's AI isn't just about efficiency; it's about personalization too. The Brand Voice feature allows the AI to adapt to your tone, making sure your responses sound authentically you. Plus, with Smart Snippets, you can "teach" the AI how to respond to recurring praises or complaints. Your AI then incorporates this information into its responses, but always with different words, providing more personalized, relevant replies.

This review response assistant has quickly become a game-changer for over 2000 customers. Its promising capacity to elevate your overall rating, amplify response rates, glean insights from customer feedback and economize both time and money, is the reason behind its growing popularity.

Final Thought

Review management across all these platforms need not be an overwhelming task. With the appropriate software, not only can you streamline your online reputation management on all these websites, but you can also personalize your responses and derive valuable insights from the reviews. So, why hesitate to give our AI Review Assistant, MARA, a try? It's completely free for testing, doesn't require a credit card, and can be fully operational in less than five minutes.

This post is a part of our hero content series on “Optimize Your Hotel Listings to Increase Bookings - All You Need to Know", “Booking.com Optimization: The Ultimate Guide for Hotel Managers" and “Mastering Tripadvisor: The Complete Guide to Improving Your Business’s Online Reputation".