Why list your hotel here?

The benefit of getting listed on Hotel Beam

Why bother creating a listing on Hotel Beam, I hear you ask. What is the benefit to my business?

Let’s summarize the benefits:

  • Its free!
  • Increase your hotel’s exposure on a growing website
  • Increase your citations
  • Link directly to your site
  • Encourage direct bookings
  • Save on costly commissions
  • Increase your Youtube video rankings and online maps

 The listings on our site can be created for free. So, at the very least it is not going to cost you any money and if you have some images and some text ready to go, it should only take about 15 minutes to create your listing.

There are many online booking websites, sometimes referred to as OTAs or Online Travel Agents, like booking.com and Agoda. They offer great exposure for hotels and they can take bookings for hotels, which as I am sure you are aware they take a commission from your booking. OTAs are huge businesses and if you search for almost any hotel name in the world, you will get a list of links to these sites the hotel is listed on.

Hotel Beam is not an OTA and does not plan on being one. This means we do not take bookings from guests and we do not take commissions if guests find your hotel from our website.

Most hotels however have their own site. The advantage of having your own website is that you are in complete control of your site and your business. OTAs have various rules especially when it comes to pricing. Most booking sites have limited ways to view contact information for the hotel, as they want you to send enquiries only through their site or platform. It can sometimes be frustrating for both guests and hotel owners.

These hotel booking sites rank very well in search engines. So much so that it can be difficult for guests to find your website even if they search on your hotel name. Optimizing a website so it appears high in a search engine for a particular keyword phrase is referred as SEO or search engine optimization. There are many factors search engines like Google use to decide on the order of the search results.

Directory listings

One metric which Google uses is the number of citations a business has.A citation is a reference to your hotel, which includes the business details, such as Name, Address and Phone number. You may see this referred to as a businesses NAP. One place to get citations for your hotel is business directories. The directory should be relevant to your industry or business. There is no point adding your hotel to a directory of plumbers for example. Directories typically focus on a particular industry, or location. Very general directories, unless they are well known and trusted are probably best avoided. Online directories are basically a modern day version of the Yellow Pages.

Promote direct bookings

While Online Travel Agents serve their purpose of generating bookings for hotels, relying to heavy on OTAs can be a huge mistake for hotels. Every OTA booking comes at a price. We would like to help hotels to promote direct bookings and increase their profits.

Embedding Maps and Videos

Our goal is to create listings that various multi media experiences, including text, images, video and maps. This gives users a richer way to experience your hotel.If you do have Youtube videos for your hotel and would like them to rank higher in Google or on Youtube itself, getting them “embedded” on other websites like Hotelbeam is one way to boost the rankings of the video. Embedded maps works in a similar fashion.