A hotel website has three jobs. Guests have to find it, they have to trust what it says, and booking has to be easier than going back to a booking site. SEO covers the first job, GEO increasingly covers the second, and conversion is the third.
Why direct bookings matter
Booking sites charge commission on every booking. Booking.com's own partner help says its commission is usually between 10% and 25%, depending on the property, with more for some programmes. Booking sites also bring guests who would never have found you, so the aim is rarely to leave them. The aim is to make sure guests who already want to book direct can do it easily.
Many guests look up a hotel's own website after finding it on a booking site. What they find there decides which way they book.
SEO: being found on Google
For an independent hotel, search engine optimisation is mostly about specific, local searches: the hotel name, "dog-friendly hotel in" a town, "hotel near" a venue or station. Booking sites dominate the broad searches. The specific ones are winnable.
- A page for each room type with real photos and what is included.
- Pages that answer the questions guests search for: parking, dogs, accessibility, getting there.
- Your name, address and phone number the same everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, booking sites.
- Structured data that tells search engines this is a hotel, where it is and what it offers.
- Fast pages. Many guests search on a phone on mobile data.
GEO: being described correctly by AI search
Generative engine optimisation is the newer job of helping AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews describe your hotel accurately when someone asks them for a recommendation. These tools build answers from pages they can read and sources they trust.
Nobody can guarantee a mention in an AI answer. What helps is the same information, stated plainly, wherever the hotel appears: clear facts on your own pages, a complete Google Business Profile, consistent details on booking sites, and real reviews. Pages that answer a question directly, in a sentence or two, are easier for these tools to quote.
Conversion: making booking easy
Most direct bookings are lost after the guest has already arrived on the website. The common reasons are simple:
- The booking button is hard to find on a phone.
- The booking engine opens on a page that looks like a different hotel.
- The guest cannot find the answer to one question, such as whether dogs are allowed, and goes back to the booking site, where the answer is.
- The site is slow, so the guest gives up before the rooms load.
Fixing these rarely needs a new booking engine. It needs the booking button on every page, the answers to common questions where guests look for them, and pages that load quickly.
Where an assistant fits
A guest assistant on the website answers the one question that would otherwise send a guest back to the booking site, and collects an enquiry if they want to book for dates it cannot check. It works best on a website that already does the basics above. See a working example.
A quick check you can do today
Open your website on your phone, on mobile data, as if you had never heard of the hotel. Time how long it takes to see a room and a price, and count the taps to reach the booking engine. Then try to find the answer to "can I bring my dog?" If any of that is slow or hard, that is where your direct bookings are going. More about hotel websites.