Hotel brandjacking means attracting the customer for personal benefits at the name of another hotel brand.

With hotel brand hijacking, the customer books the hotel room from any other website, rather than from the branded hotel website.

When any brand forms, it gains the customer’s brand trust, and the customer directly searches for the hotel with its name. Hence, direct booking from the hotel website should be high.

But, what is happening here is hotel brand hijacking. When any person searches for any hotel in the search engine, the branded hotel name is the top search result with any other link.

That leads to the loss of direct booking through the branded hotel website.

How does a Hotel Get Affected Through Hotel Brandjacking?

When direct booking through the hotel website gets hamper, hotels must suffer in many ways. Here, we will tell how brandjacking affects any hotel firm.

Loss Due to Paying Commission to OTA

When the online booking takes place through the OTA, then the hotelier has to pay some amount as the commission to the OTA per booking. It led to a lot of loss.

Branded hotels spend millions of money on maintaining their brand value and marketing.

Still, they have to pay a commission to OTA for the bookings.

Loss of Clients

OTA shows many hotels while booking. When any customer is going to book a hotel room by OTA, the customer can compare the searched hotel price with another listed hotel.

That results in the loss of leads, which can be one of the sales conversions. 

Hotel Strategy Failures

Hoteliers make the hotel strategy to get more customers in your hotel. But due to hotel brand hijacking, you need to be aware of why the number of customers is getting less.

For this, they change their pricing strategies, changing room fares, facility, and food prices. Because hoteliers think that the number of fewer customers is due to higher prices, but this is due to brandjacking.

How to Protect Hotels from Brandjacking?

After knowing the side effects of brand jacking, hoteliers try to protect the hotel from brand jacking.

Discount Coupon by Direct Booking from Website

Everyone wants a discount and saves money by direct booking. So, hoteliers can attract customers to book directly from the hotel’s website.

Offers, rewards, and discounts can also be applied in the final billing to give profit to customers. QloApps reward system is the addon that helps to build loyal customers.

Hence, they will only go to this website to book a room in the same hotel. It will improve the number of direct bookings from the website and increase the hotel’s branding.

To make this successful, ensure discount coupons are working, and the hotel website supports multiple payment gateways. That makes payment successful and secured.

Make User-Friendly Website

If the website is very well built and covers all the vital features, enriched with beautiful photos and gifs, it will help in customer engagement. 

The hotel website should cover the basic information about what kind of room they have and what facilities and amenities they offer.

The location and the hotel map should be there. Therefore, the customer can reach them easily.

When the customer gets engaged, then they can proceed with the booking. The booking process should be seamless. The user can select the room in the cart and go for a payment. The payment process should be simple, secure, and accessible. 

QloApps is free hotel software with multiple payment gateways. QloApps payment gateway supports payment through multiple options. Hence, the bookings become successful via the hotel website.

Use Google’s Trademark Protections

In this policy, the hotelier can file a complaint against the rival that they are using your brand name in Google advertisements.

So, they can take any action against it, or they will put any restriction on the hotel to use another hotel brand name.

Key Takeaways

If any OTA or any other firm uses the hotel’s brand name to improve its sales are called hotel brandjacking or hotel brand hijacking.

It reduces the direct booking of customers. Due to this, the hotel has to pay the commission to the OTA. It leads to a lot of loss to the hotel.

Therefore, hoteliers can take the help of Google trademark protection, make the finest hotel website and provide a discount to the customers. All this results in increasing direct booking.

Please Share your View

That’s all from the How to Protect Hotel Brandjacking. I hope you like our blog.

If you want to create a hotel website, QloApps is a free hotel booking software. Try out the demo of QloApps and share your experience.

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