by

Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 23, 2018

Bing Ads will roll out the general release of Hotel Ads with its first partner, Koddi, a travel ad platform that drives bookings through metasearch and Facebook.

For advertisers, the launch of Bing Hotel Ads means access to a new metasearch engine that allows brands to directly interact with potential customers. Marketers can optimize the campaign by device type, length of stay, and day of the week.

The ad platform will launch as a pay-per-click campaign, similar to Shopping Ads, with a flexible account structure, meaning that marketers can organize the campaign for the hotel into groups, sub-accounts, and accounts with multiple levels of bidding.

Travelers may find a hotel, but must deal with scratchy sheets, inadequate parking, and noisy locations. Despite many struggles to make it easier and more comfortable for travelers, hotels have put more emphasis on an easier path to booking rooms and services. In this case, the hotel data is populated through an XML feed that contains the name of the hotel, phone number and location.

For travelers, reading the recommendations on a site always is helpful for newcomers to a specific location. The search feature provides information on dates and prices, as well as an option to sort search results by Best Match, Price, and Rating, which would include reviews.

A TripAdvisor integration displays reviews and rankings and the ability to upload multiple image cards. The ad feature also provides an interactive map supported by Bing Maps that allows travelers to customize searches.

Bing Ads is not the only platform to provide new features for advertisers and travelers. Analyst firm Raymond James reports in a research note that Airbnb has launched several features around payments to make bookings easier for travelers.

One of those options includes split payments for bookings. For example, as of January 15, Airbnb will allow travelers to pay for part of their trip at the time of booking and the remainder closer to the check-in date. It costs travelers a little more, but 40% of guests during earlier tests chose to do so and opted for higher-value bookings.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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