Hi there, Brian Fitzgerald with O’Rourke hospitality marketing. I want to talk today about metasearch connectivity. This is, uh, something that if you’re going to embark on a meta-search campaign, this is certainly something that you’re going to have to figure out.

Uh, and this is really often the biggest hurdle that we encounter, uh, with our clients in terms of getting, uh, getting our campaigns set up.

And, and the reason is that what you see here. So this is an example from Google hotel ads. This is where the, uh, the property at the very top, you can see it’s labeled official site.

Uh, there are rates here and these are real-time rates. And these are rates that are being pulled based on specific dates that our users, uh, putting in.

And so that CA that connectivity to their rates and inventory has to be there in order for this to work.

Um, and now, depending on your setup, that’s where things can be either quite easy or quite complicated. And so, as we all know, we all have different setups with our property management system, our central reservation system, our internet booking engine.

You might have all three of these. You might have one of these. You might have two of these. You might have even some other softwares or solutions that, that are plugging into to, um, to these like a channel manager.

Uh, and so shown here are some of the players in this space. There are many, many, many more, um, but depending on what you have, um, in terms of an internet booking engine, a channel manager, uh, you likely have multiple options for how you can establish that connection that is needed.

And so you’ll have to, you’ll have to ask those questions and understand what the pros and the cons are. Um, and if, if somebody is able to, you know, maybe has a better track record of doing it versus somebody who it’s, it’s a newer, newer type of offering for them.

So, uh, just know that going into it, you likely have multiple options that you can consider. Um, the other thing that the big thing to kind of have your antenna and radar up for is added costs or incremental costs, um, for a lot of different players.

What we found through our clients is that the meta-search connectivity, is it part of what they’re paying for in whatever package they have today, or that it’s an added service or an added module from the provider to, to, you know, flip on or enable that connectivity.

So just be aware of that. It could be, it could be a one-time setup. Cost could be a, it could be an ongoing, incremental cost to pay for that product.

So keep that in mind. And then the last thing is we’ve seen this from a handful of clients as well, who, uh, weren’t very clear that this was, was part of their, um, their program with their internet booking engine or CRS.

And that is some of them have relationships where they’ll enable that meta-search connectivity for you, but in their fine print, they’re, they’re also taking a commission on any bookings that are coming through that connectivity.

So keep that in mind, just make sure to kind of read the fine print, ask all the right questions, make sure you understand that, uh, there could be some added costs.

Those costs could be one time, or they could be ongoing and all that comes back to which solutions and which providers do you have.

But, uh, if you’re, if you’re going down this path and like some help or how some questions, uh, certainly get in touch with us, we’ve done this for quite a few of our clients, and we’d be happy to help you out.