Win More Hotel Bookings by Reaching Travelers Before They Search

It also puts them in direct competition with every other property targeting the same searches, including online travel agencies with substantial advertising budgets.

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Hotels that reach travelers earlier have an opportunity to influence where they choose to go and introduce their properties before that competition begins. When those travelers eventually search for accommodations, they may already have a hotel in mind.

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Nearly Two-Thirds of Travelers Return to Destinations They've Visited Before

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Data shows that for many travelers, the choice of destination is already made by the time they begin researching accommodations.

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In research published by Phocuswright in 2022, 63% of U.S. travelers said they had a specific destination in mind for their last trip and hadn't researched other options. The same research found that nearly two-thirds of travelers chose a destination they were returning to. That means hotels in those destinations are competing for travelers who have already narrowed their choices to a particular market.

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The return-visit finding suggests that a household's travel history can be a useful indicator of where it may choose to vacation in the future.

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Hotels can use that information to identify prospective guests with an established interest in their destination, giving them an opportunity to reach those travelers before they begin searching for accommodations.

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Waiting for the Search Means Competing With the OTAs

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When travelers already know where they're going, searching for a hotel puts them in front of competing properties and online travel agencies (OTAs) with substantial advertising budgets.

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Booking Holdings, the parent company of Booking.com, reported approximately $8.2 billion in marketing expenses in 2025. According to its annual report, most of that spending went toward performance marketing, primarily through search engines such as Google. Expedia Group also purchases travel-related keywords to attract visitors to its websites.

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For travelers still considering different destinations, the opportunity to influence their choice comes earlier. They're comparing locations based on cost, available activities, and the type of trip they want to take. Hotels that reach these travelers during that process have an opportunity to introduce their destination before a decision is made.

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By the time travelers begin searching for accommodations, they may already be familiar with hotels that reached them earlier in the planning process. That early exposure gives those properties a chance to be considered when travelers are ready to book.

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Use Past Guest Data to Find New Prospects

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A hotel may attract guests from hundreds of miles away, but that doesn't mean its potential customers are evenly distributed across that entire area. Certain communities may account for a disproportionate share of reservations. Some households may consistently book longer vacations, while others prefer shorter stays at particular times of year.

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Those patterns can reveal opportunities that wouldn't be apparent from the property's location or positioning alone. And because they're based on actual reservations, they reflect the people who have chosen to spend money at the property.

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For hotels looking to attract new guests, that information can be particularly valuable. A property may have thousands of previous guests in its database, but there could be many more households with similar characteristics that have never considered staying there.

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Purchased audience data provides a way to identify those households. Hotels can use the geographic and household characteristics of previous guests to find prospective visitors with similar profiles, then refine that audience based on past travel behavior. Where people have traveled before and how frequently they travel can help identify households with an established interest in visiting comparable destinations.

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Of course, travel habits change. Someone who regularly took family vacations several years ago may now travel less frequently or prefer different types of trips. That's why the recency of purchased travel data matters. Marketers need to understand how recently those behaviors were observed before relying on them to select an audience.

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Site Impact’s Identity Graph helps hotels build these lookalike audiences, extending their reach well beyond their own guest database. From there, Email Enhanced pairs email with digital media so the same prospects see the property in the inbox and across the web, and the audience can be extended to other channels such as direct mail or connected TV through a demand-side platform (DSP). That way the hotel is already familiar to those travelers before they start searching for accommodations.

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Run Campaigns Before Your Guests Usually Book

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Hotels have a better chance of influencing travel decisions when they reach prospective guests early in the planning process.

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By examining when previous guests made their reservations, hotels can determine how far ahead of each season to begin advertising to prospective guests. The goal is to introduce the property before those households are likely to start booking their trips.

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That earlier exposure gives prospective guests a chance to become familiar with the hotel before they begin comparing accommodations. They may eventually return through a search engine to research the property or make a reservation, having already encountered it during their travel planning.

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Use Booking Data to Improve Future Campaigns

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The households most likely to book a hotel may not be exactly the ones marketers expected to attract. That's why it's worth looking beyond campaign engagement to see who actually made reservations.

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One way to do that is through matchback analysis, which compares the households reached during a campaign with the hotel's booking records. At Site Impact, we use this approach to help clients identify which targeted households ultimately became customers and what those customers have in common.

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The results may reveal that certain geographic markets produce more bookings than expected or that particular household characteristics are more common among guests who convert. Marketers can use those findings to refine their audience selections rather than continuing to rely on their original assumptions.

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By comparing campaign audiences with actual bookings, hotels can better understand which households responded to their marketing and which characteristics are most common among those who became guests. Those findings provide a stronger basis for refining future campaigns, with targeting decisions informed by actual customer behavior.

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Over time, hotels can build a more accurate understanding of their prospective customers by incorporating each season's booking results into the audience selections and campaign timing for the next.

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Reaching Travelers Earlier With Site Impact

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Getting in front of travelers before they search depends on knowing who is likely to visit, when they tend to book, and how to reach them before the OTAs do. Site Impact helps hotels and resorts put that into practice, from building prospect audiences modeled on past guests to reaching them through Email Enhanced and measuring which campaigns turned into actual bookings. If you’re planning campaigns for next season, our team can help you get started.