A hotel has three ways to buy visibility on Google: a Search campaign on keywords, Hotel campaigns (Google Hotel Ads) inside the price panel, and Performance Max for travel goals. Generic city keywords cost between £1.06 and £1.82 a click in the UK (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026; CPC converted from USD at £1 = $1.3242), but auction competition is among the highest we measure, because Booking.com and Expedia are bidding on the other side.
Google Ads for hotels works when the account is built around direct bookings: a campaign that protects the hotel's name, a Hotel campaign connected to the booking engine, city keywords only when they include a service or a season, and tracking that counts bookings with their value, not clicks on the "book" button.
Below you will find what three UK operators actually do with paid campaigns, the measured CPCs, a calculated minimum budget and the mistakes we find most often in accommodation accounts. The organic side is covered in the companion article SEO for hotels.
Google Hotel Ads: how it works in 2026
Google Hotel Ads is the part of Google Ads that shows your property's price in the Google Hotels panel, the one that appears above all organic results for a search like "hotels blackpool" (for a one-night stay at the end of September: Grand Hotel Blackpool from £42, The Imperial Hotel from £53, Premier Inn Blackpool North Pier from £81). Once the dates are chosen, the panel lists the sites where you can book, each with its price: Booking.com, Expedia, and the hotel's official website, if it is there.
To be there you need two things. The first is a connection that sends rates and availability to Hotel Center: almost every booking engine and channel manager can do it (SiteMinder, Bookassist and similar, each with its own pricing). The second is a Hotel campaign in Google Ads linked to that Hotel Center account. If you have the first piece but not the second you still appear, free, through "free booking links": Google introduced them in 2021 and they are still the cheapest way to get your direct rate into the panel. The free booking link sits below the paid positions, though, and in a city with a lot of supply it is often off the first screen.
One thing many guides still repeat that is no longer true: commission-based payment. The "Commissions per stay" (pay per stay) and "Commissions per conversion" bid strategies were closed to new campaigns by Google on 30 April 2024 and retired completely on 20 February 2025 (source: Google Ads Help, "Commission-based bid strategies in hotel ads to sunset"). Today a Hotel campaign is paid per click, with enhanced CPC or target ROAS, or you move to Performance Max for travel goals. The "pay only when the guest stays" model no longer exists.
Which keywords the chains buy on Search (and which they don't)
The common belief is that Google Ads for a hotel means buying "hotel + city". We looked at what three operators of very different sizes buy.
| Domain | Paid keywords | What they buy | Top keywords by volume (CPC) |
|---|---|---|---|
| premierinn.com | 443 | own locations, competitor names, some generic city searches | "travelodge edinburgh" 27,100 (£1.13), "premier inn docklands" 18,100 (£0.60), "bournemouth hotels" 14,800 (£1.28) |
| travelodge.co.uk | 36 | towns and specific needs | "hotels london gatwick north terminal" 12,100 (£2.14), "southampton hotel" 8,100 (£1.39), "hotels in ely cambs" 2,900 (£1.38) |
| boulevardhotel.co.uk | 0 | - | no campaigns detected |
Only the largest chain buys generic city searches. Premier Inn, with hundreds of hotels across the country, can do it for the same reason the OTAs can: every click on "bournemouth hotels" can end up at one of its own properties. It also bids on competitors' names ("travelodge edinburgh", "ibis hotel leeds centre"). Travelodge buys much less, and mostly specific needs ("hotels by waterloo station london", "hotels in morecambe with parking"). The Boulevard Hotel, an independent that ranks first organically for "hotels blackpool" (12,100 searches a month), buys nothing.
The takeaway: the auction on generic city keywords is run by the OTAs and by chains that monetise across hundreds of properties. A single hotel that enters that auction pays the same click for a user who hasn't yet chosen the area. The keywords where an independent buys well fall into three groups.
- Its own name and variants ("boulevard hotel blackpool", "boulevard hotel blackpool prices"): low CPCs, high conversion rate, and these are the searches Booking.com buys instead of you if you don't.
- City + service or reason ("brighton hotels with pool", 1,000 searches a month at £0.98; "seafront hotels in blackpool"; "hotels near excel london", 4,400 searches at £2.96): whoever searches these has already chosen the area and the type of property. Venue searches can cost more than the generic ones, so check the CPC before building the campaign.
- Seasons and events (New Year's Eve, Easter breaks, the Blackpool Illuminations, the city's main trade fair or conference): in Ads they are switched on for four to six weeks and then switched off.
On match types: phrase for city + service keywords, exact on the brand. Broad match should only be used once booking tracking works, and with automated bidding, otherwise the account ends up buying "hotels in london" through the back door. Negatives to add on day one: "jobs", "careers", "reviews", "booking", "trivago", "tripadvisor", "free", "hostel", and the names of nearby towns where you don't have a property.
Further reading: long tail and short tail keywords.
How to structure a hotel account
For a single property, the account we run has four campaigns, switched on in this order.
- Brand: Search, exact and phrase match on the hotel's name, small budget, always on. If organic clicks on the brand don't fall when the campaign is running, the campaign is taking traffic that was going to the OTAs.
- Hotel (Google Hotel Ads): linked to Hotel Center, with enhanced CPC for the first 30-60 days and then target ROAS once there are at least 30 tracked bookings.
- Search city + service: one or two ad groups for each combination with volume ("seafront", "with pool", "near the conference centre"), dedicated landing pages, budget adjusted to the season.
- Seasonal and events: campaigns with a start and end date, reusing the same landing page every year (New Year, Easter, the city's main event).
Performance Max for travel goals comes later, not first: it extends coverage to Maps, YouTube and Display, but without bookings tracked with their value it optimises for whatever it finds. In the accounts we inherit, Performance Max switched on from day one is the most common case of budget spent without knowing on what.
Further reading: when Google Ads makes sense.
Where to send the click: landing page and booking engine
A click from a Hotel campaign arrives with the dates already chosen: the landing page has to open the booking engine with those dates and that number of guests, not the website's home page. If the user has to enter everything again, some of them go back to Booking.com, where the dates were already filled in.
For city + service Search campaigns, the landing page is the page for that service (pool, spa, family room) with the booking widget at the top and a visible "from" price. Two checks before going live: rate parity (if your own site is more expensive than Booking.com, the campaign is paying to send guests to the OTAs) and the booking engine's speed on mobile, the most common cause of conversion rates below 1%.
Further reading: why a website doesn't convert.
How to track bookings (not button clicks)
In hotel accounts the conversion is almost always set up wrongly, because the booking engine sits on a different domain from the website. What we find: the conversion is the click on "Book" (which also counts people who check prices and leave), or a visit to the booking engine, or there is no conversion at all.
We have measured how much this can distort the numbers in other sectors. At Valore Solare, before we stepped in, the account counted 15,267 "conversions" in a month against 5,467 clicks: they were technical events. At Sunscape there were 1,487 conversions at €0.61 each, again events. In both cases Google's automated strategies were optimising for those numbers, in other words for nothing. A hotel with the conversion set on the "Book" click is in the same position.
The correct setup has three parts: cross-domain tracking between website and booking engine in Google Analytics 4, a confirmed-booking event that passes the value of the stay as the conversion value, and that event imported into Google Ads as the primary conversion. Phone calls are tracked separately, with call assets, and count as a secondary conversion. Only then does target ROAS make sense.
Further reading: Google Analytics 4 and the Valore Solare case study.
How much budget you need: the sums with measured CPCs
Let's do the sums for a 4-star hotel in Brighton that wants to sell direct. Take the CPC of "4 star hotels brighton", £1.22, and a booking engine conversion rate of 2.5%, which is a typical figure for an independent property with rate parity and a fast website (below 1% if the booking engine is slow, above 4% on the brand).
- 40 clicks per booking, so £48.80 cost per booking.
- With an average stay of two nights at, say, £150 a night, that is £300 of revenue: acquisition cost is 16% of revenue, in line with an OTA commission (15-25%), but with the guest in your own system and the second booking free.
- On the brand the sums change: CPCs of around £0.25-0.45 and a 4-5% conversion rate give £5-10 per booking. That is why the brand campaign goes live first.
- To have data you can make decisions on, you need at least 300-400 clicks a month on non-brand campaigns: at £1.22 a click that is £365-490 a month, plus £85-130 for brand. The sensible minimum for a single hotel is therefore around £450-600 a month in season, not counting the management fee.
In London the sums are similar, with a reversed calendar: "hotels central london" costs £1.82 a click and demand peaks between September and January (22,200 searches a month against 14,800 from May to August), while by the sea "hotels in blackpool" goes from 8,100 searches in December to 22,200 in July, August and September. Budget should follow your own city's curve, not be spread evenly across twelve months.
The limit of this calculation: the 2.5% conversion rate is our own average, not a Keyword Planner figure, and it varies a lot by category (a 5-star hotel converts less but with a higher average spend). Replace it with your own number after the first month of correct tracking.
Further reading: Google Ads statistics 2026 and how to calculate ROI.
The mistakes we find most often in hotel accounts
- No brand campaign while Booking.com buys the hotel's name. It is the most expensive mistake because it is invisible: the booking still comes in, but with 15-18% commission.
- Conversion set on the "Book" click, or missing. Automated strategies optimise for a number that isn't a booking.
- Performance Max switched on first, with no conversion value: it spends on Display and YouTube because clicks are cheaper there, and the report says "conversions" without saying which.
- Generic "hotel + city" keywords on broad match, with no negatives: the account enters the OTA auction and pays up to £1.80 for someone who hasn't yet chosen the area.
- Price feed out of sync: the ad shows one price, the booking engine another, and Google reduces visibility for the mismatch.
- The same budget for twelve months in a place where demand almost triples between low and high season.
- No remarketing to people who opened the booking engine without completing: it is the warmest audience the hotel has.
Further reading: how to do remarketing.
Google Ads or SEO for a hotel?
On the "hotels blackpool" SERP, five of the nine organic results on the first page belong to OTAs and comparison sites (Trivago, lastminute.com, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Hotels.com), plus the tourist board's accommodation list. SEO for an independent hotel works on the brand, the Google Business Profile, area pages and events; Google Ads covers the price panel, protecting the name and city + service keywords in the months when the demand is there. For Premier Inn, ads bring an estimated 21,000 visits a month against about 6 million organic, but those are visits from the panel where people book.
How to build the organic side is in SEO for hotels; for how the two channels fit together, see SEO and Google Ads together. If the property sells packages and experiences as well as rooms, Google Ads for tourism is also worth a read.
Frequently asked questions
Is Google Hotel Ads free?
Appearing in the panel through "free booking links" is free: all you need is a booking engine or channel manager connected to Hotel Center. The top positions in the price panel are paid, per click. The commission-per-stay model has not existed since 20 February 2025.
How much does a Google Ads click cost for a hotel?
On generic city keywords in the UK, between £1.06 ("hotels blackpool") and £1.82 ("hotels central london"), with a high top-of-page bid between £1.16 and £2.00. Much less on the hotel's own name. In Hotel campaigns the cost varies by date and location and has to be read in your own account.
Do you need a channel manager for Google Hotel Ads?
You need a partner that sends rates and availability to Hotel Center: the channel manager, or the booking engine directly if it is one of the integration partners. Without a price feed the Hotel campaign won't run; the Search campaign will.
Is it worth advertising on your own hotel's name?
Yes, if an OTA or a chain is buying it: search for your name and look at the ads. Premier Inn bids on competitors' hotel names, so the risk is real for chains and independents alike. If nobody is buying your brand, the campaign can stay on a minimum budget, as insurance.
Does Performance Max for travel goals replace Hotel campaigns?
No, it includes them: it uses the Hotel Center feed and the property's Business Profile to show ads on Maps, YouTube and Display as well. It is the campaign Google recommends in place of the old commission models, but without bookings tracked with their value it has nothing to optimise for.
Where to start
Search for your hotel's name on Google from a phone. If there is a Booking.com or Expedia ad above your website, the first pound goes into the brand campaign, today. Then pick any date in the Google Hotels panel and look at who appears in the price list: if your website isn't there, connect the booking engine to Hotel Center before spending anything else. The rest (Search city + service, seasonal campaigns, Performance Max) comes after a month of bookings tracked with their value.
If you would like us to look at your account or the auctions in your area together, get in touch: we work with properties in Italy and in Ticino.
