This guide started with a hotel's own name. Chapter 2 argued that a traveler typing your hotel's name is ready to book, so the brand campaign comes first and gets the bigger share of the budget. This last chapter explains the other half of that decision: why the booking sites want the same search, why they're allowed to have it and what a hotel can do about it.
The stakes are getting bigger, not smaller. Cloudbeds, a hotel software company that reports on its own customers' bookings, found that booking sites' share of North American independent hotels' bookings rose 3.3 points in 2025, to 52.7%. Every one of those bookings carries a commission.
Booking.com's Contract Lets It Advertise on Your Hotel's Name. Google's Rules Let It Too.
Start with the contract most hotels have already signed. Booking.com's General Delivery Terms, the standard agreement for properties outside the European Economic Area, say plainly that Booking.com "may promote the Accommodation using the Accommodation's name in this marketing, including email marketing and pay-per-click advertising." Its partner help pages add that it markets properties through more than 17,500 affiliate partners, which means the auction for a hotel's name can hold more than one booking site's ads.
Google's rules don't stand in the way. Google's trademark policy says it won't restrict the use of trademarks as keywords, and it allows resellers, advertisers whose pages actually sell the product, to use the trademark in their ads as long as the ad isn't confusing or misleading about who the advertiser is. A booking site that sells rooms at your hotel is a reseller under that policy. A trademark complaint can stop an ad that pretends to be your official site. It can't remove a legitimate booking site from your name.
Some hotels have kept booking sites off their names, but they're not independents. Agreements from 2015 between Expedia and two of the biggest chains, quoted in a later lawsuit that settled on confidential terms, had Expedia add the chains' names as negative keywords, and in one of them both sides agreed to do it. We found no evidence of a standard contract that gives an independent hotel the same protection. You can ask your booking site's market manager. Plan as if the answer is no.
Booking Sites Run Ads Under the Names of Hotels They Don't Own
In our example market, New Orleans, the hotel-name searches looked like contested ground. Keyword Planner put most of the example hotels' names in its medium or high competition band. One historic French Quarter hotel's name drew 33,100 searches a month, and the estimate for a top spot on it ran from 47 cents to $3.35 a click. That band counts how many advertisers show up, not who they are, but someone is paying for those clicks.
The booking sites' own ads show what they do with the names. Of 187 booking-site ads we read in Google's Ads Transparency Center, 18 named a specific property in the headline, though none of those 18 was a New Orleans hotel, from a "special offer" on one hotel to a "best price guarantee" on another. On the four hotel-name searches we scraped, booking and review sites filled most of the free results below the ads; for one, Tripadvisor ranked first and a last-minute booking app second.
You don't have to guess who's bidding on your own name. Two reports from earlier chapters answer it. Auction insights on the brand campaign, from Chapter 7, lists the other advertisers in your name's auctions and how often they ranked above you. The search terms report shows which versions of your name, misspellings included, triggered your ads. Read both once a month, and look at your name's results with Chapter 5's Ad preview tool on a phone as well as a computer, since the lineup can change by device. If a booking site's ad appears above yours more than now and then, the brand campaign needs more budget or a better ad.
The Brand Campaign Is the Cheapest Booking a Hotel Can Buy. Fund It First.
Chapter 3 did the arithmetic. On a two-night stay at the US average rate, an 18% commission costs the hotel about $58. A booking from a search for the hotel's own name, at an illustrative $1.50 a click and 5% of clicks booking, costs about $30 in ads. Even at half again that click price, about $45 a booking, the brand campaign beats the commission. No other campaign in this guide comes close.
The direct booking is often worth more, too. SiteMinder, a hotel distribution company reporting on its own customers worldwide, found that bookings through hotels' own websites averaged $516 in 2025, against $312 for booking sites. And Cloudbeds' customer data shows booking-site reservations cancel far more often than direct ones, about 22% against 10.6%. Both companies describe their own customers, not every hotel, but the direction is the same in both: the guest who books direct tends to spend more and actually show up.
So the brand campaign gets what it needs to win:
- Exact match on the name and its common misspellings, so every version of the name is yours on purpose.
- A budget that doesn't run out. Chapter 10 showed what happens when it does: Performance Max can take some of your exact searches. Booking sites can take the rest.
- An ad that says why to book here. "Official site" is a start. A reason is better: free breakfast, free parking or a better room for booking direct, if the hotel offers it.
- The pieces from earlier chapters: the brand exclusion on Performance Max (Chapter 10), the location asset for travelers already in town (Chapter 12) and the price feed that puts the hotel's own rate, marked official, next to the booking sites' rates (Chapter 14).
Note one asymmetry in Booking.com's terms. A hotel may bid on "booking.com" as a keyword, but the same clause bars using Booking.com's brand in the hotel's ads for price comparison without written approval. Your ad can be found by someone searching for the booking site. It shouldn't mention the booking site by name.
"Cheaper Than Booking.com" Is the Riskiest Line a Hotel Can Put in an Ad
The tempting ad is a price promise: book direct and save. For most US hotels on Booking.com, that's the line the contract is most likely to catch. Booking.com's terms put US properties under what it calls wide parity, which its partner help pages describe as giving Booking.com "the same or better rates, conditions, and availability" as the hotel makes available on any other channel, its own website included. A public direct rate below the Booking.com rate for the same room and dates sits squarely inside that clause.
There's a narrow exception for closed user groups: rates for members who have opted in, logged in, completed a profile and booked before, as long as those rates aren't publicly available. That's a loyalty program, not a coupon code in an ad. If your hotel has one, a "members save" line pointing to a login is the safer version of a discount. This chapter isn't legal advice; have someone read your actual contract before you advertise any rate comparison.
Fortunately, price isn't the strongest reason guests give for booking direct anyway. Chapter 8 found that in travelers' own discussions, help when something goes wrong and loyalty perks were the top reasons to book direct. The example market's reviews show why. One guest wrote that "because we booked through a third‑party site, the hotel refused to issue a credit," while "our friends, who booked directly through the hotel, were given a credit for the same night." A front desk worker on Reddit put the other side bluntly: "We are prohibited from upgrading third party bookings." That's one employee's account, not a rule at every hotel, but it's the kind of difference a book-direct ad can promise if your hotel really works that way.
The Billboard Effect Is Disputed. A Brand Campaign Pays Off Either Way.
Hotels often hear that being listed on booking sites brings in direct bookings too, because travelers find the hotel there and then book on its own site. It's called the billboard effect, and the evidence for it is real but contested.
The original study, from Cornell in 2009, cycled four hotels on and off Expedia and found that being listed lifted bookings through other channels by 7.5% to 26%, with the largest lift, 26%, at the one independent hotel. It was done in partnership with Expedia. A 2015 study sponsored by the American Hotel and Lodging Association argued the effect may no longer exist. A later Cornell paper by Anderson and Han, as summarized by the European Commission, put the effect between 5% and 35%, and later work by the same researchers found it weaker for branded hotels than for independents. And Germany's competition authority found, in 2020, that 99% of consumers who first found their hotel on Booking.com booked it there.
Most of those studies had a stake in their answer, so don't build a budget on any single number. The practical lesson doesn't depend on which is right. If a traveler finds your hotel on a booking site and then searches your name to look you up, the brand campaign is what they see. If it isn't running, they land back on the booking site's listing, and the billboard effect pays the booking site twice.
A Hotel's Cheapest Booking Is Still the Guest Who Searched Its Name
That's the guide. It began with tracking every booking and its value, then the brand campaign, the commission math and ad groups that match what travelers search. Then the negative list, exact match before the long tail and bidding that moves from hand to booking value. Ads in guests' own words, location aimed where guests live, then Performance Max, Demand Gen and AI Max, each switched on when the bookings say the account is ready, plus the map listing for travelers already in town. The two bonus chapters cover what's unique to hotels: the price feed, and the name everyone else is bidding on.
Every chapter is collected on the hotel guide's home page. If you're starting from zero, begin with booking tracking, then why the hotel's name comes first; if your account is already running, the price feed is the piece to check first this month.
When we run a hotel's Google Ads, the brand campaign is the first thing we build and the last thing we cut. Running it yourself? Search your hotel's name on your phone tonight, and count how many booking sites appear before your own website does.
