Travel Roadmap - Boutique/Franchise Hotel

Use this guide if you're a hotelier who operates a single, boutique-style hotel, a small local chain with just a handful of properties or a franchised hotel property.

Implementation Roadmap (Recommended)

For your type of hotel business, we recommend these phases:

Phase 1: Trip Consideration - Reach people with travel intent, but who have not yet selected a destination.
Phase 2: Hotel Ads for Prospecting - Promote relevant rooms, entertainment, amenities and more to people with travel intent, even if they have not yet visited your website or app.
Phase 3: Hotel Ads for Retargeting - Promote your inventory to people who have already engaged with your website or app.
Phase 4: Upselling & Loyalty Programs - Drive ancillary revenue from people who've already booked hotels through your services.

We recommend progressing through the phases one at a time, in sequential order, and measuring the change in performance of your ads after each phase. Because every business is different, this process will help you understand how each step works for your specific situation.

Need help? Reach out to your Facebook POC if you run into any roadblocks, or if you need help understanding how best to measure your performance.

Trip Consideration

Trip consideration is a prospecting solution that enables you to deliver static ad creative to people with travel intent, but who have not yet selected a destination. You may want to take a "try it and see" approach to Trip Consideration, because hoteliers who use hotel ads for prospecting in conjunction with trip consideration may see a significant overlap between the audiences for the two solutions.

Set Up Trip Consideration

Option 1 - Overview and setup using Ads Manager
Option 2 - Setup using the Marketing API (for advanced users)

Hotel Ads for Prospecting

The next step in improving the impact of your Facebook ads is implementing hotel ads. This process consists of three main steps:

Step 1: Set up your catalog
Step 2: Configure your Pixel for hotel ads
Step 3: Create your ads

If you're the operator of a franchised property who manages their own ad spend, but relies on a centralized team for the technical implementation of the Pixel and catalog, you can skip steps 1 and 2.

Step 1: Set up your catalog

For this step, you need to follow most of the usual process for setting up a Hotel catalog, but the way you populate the catalog with data is slightly different. Ordinarily, each item in a Hotel catalog represents a particular hotel location or property. However, because your business operates a single property, we'll "hack" the catalog to contain room types and various other kinds of items instead (for example, shows, restaurants, spa services, and so on).

Step 1: Set up your catalog with Facebook's UI.

You can also set up your catalog using the Marketing API, but this is intended for advanced users. You should only use this method if you're sure you know what you're doing.

Step 2: Instead of populating the catalog with hotels, simply create an entry for each distinct type of hotel room you offer, and any other services, amenities or entertainment you want to promote.

The location fields (address, latitude, longitude and neighborhood) for each entry should typically be the same as your hotel's. You may find that many of the optional hotel fields don't apply to things like rooms and amenities (for example, guest_ratings). Leave those fields blank or don't include them in your catalog at all. As long as you ensure that all the required fields are filled in, your ads will work as they should.

Example: Hotel Room - An entry representing a hotel room type might look like this:

<listing>
  <hotel_id>roomtype_11</hotel_id>
  <name>Deluxe Suite with Pool View</name>
  <description>All of our deluxe suites offer exceptional views of our magnificent new pool area.</description>
  <brand>island_life_resort</brand>
  <url>https://www.islandlifehotels.com/rooms/deluxe_suite_pool</url>
  <address format="simple">
    <component name="addr1">100 Beach Street</component>
    <component name="city">Key West</component>
    <component name="city_id">12345</component>
    <component name="region">Florida</component>
    <component name="country">United States</component>
    <component name="postal_code">33040</component>
  </address>
  <latitude>37.484100</latitude>
  <longitude>-122.148252</longitude>
  <neighborhood>Florida Keys</neighborhood>
  <base_price>339.99 USD</base_price>
  <image>
  <url>http://www.islandlifehotels.com/images/image_1.jpg</url>
    <tag>Room View</tag>
    <tag>Room Interior</tag>
  </image>
  <image>
    <url>http://www.islandlifehotels.com/images/image_2.jpg</url>
    <tag>Room View</tag>
  </image>
  <loyalty_program>island_life_rewards</loyalty_program>
  <margin_level>8</margin_level>
</listing>

Example: Spa Service - An entry representing a spa service:

<listing>
  <hotel_id>spa_hotstone</hotel_id>
  <name>Hot Stone Massage at the Orchid</name>
  <description>Melt away stress with our therapeutic hot stone massage.</description>
  <brand>devonshire_hotel</brand>
  <url>https://www.devonshirehotel.com/orchid_spa/hotstone</url>
  <address format="simple">
    <component name="addr1">220 Astin St</component>
    <component name="city">Chicago</component>
    <component name="city_id">934</component>
    <component name="region">Illinois</component>
    <component name="country">United States</component>
    <component name="postal_code">60611</component>
  </address>
  <latitude>37.484100</latitude>
  <longitude>-122.148252</longitude>
  <neighborhood>River North</neighborhood>
  <base_price>228 USD</base_price>
  <image>
    <url>http://www.devonshirehotel.com/images/image_1.jpg</url>
    <tag>Spa Treatment</tag>
  </image>
  <image>
    <url>http://www.devonshirehotel.com/images/image_2.jpg</url>
    <tag>Spa Lobby</tag>
  </image>
  <loyalty_program>devonshire_club</loyalty_program>
  <margin_level>9</margin_level>
</listing>

Step 2: Configure your Pixel for Hotel Ads

Important: Before continuing, make sure you've installed the Facebook Pixel across your company's website.

Follow the steps in Configure your Pixel for hotel ads
Learn more about Advantage+ Catalog Ads - Events for hotel ads

Note: Because you're using a modified Hotel catalog, continue to use content_type: "hotel" in your events, even though you're actually sending signals about various types of rooms, products and offerings.

Step 3: Create your ads

Setting up a campaign to use hotel ads for prospecting is similar to setting up any other Facebook Ad, with some differences in targeting and a few additional best practices you should be aware of:

Overview and setup using Ads Manager
Learn more about all the Hotel-specific template tags that are available for use in your ad creative

You can also set up hotel ads for prospecting using the Marketing API, but this is intended for advanced users. You should only use this method if you're sure you know what you're doing.

Hotel Ads for Retargeting

Now that you've set up hotel ads for prospecting, we highly recommended that you also set up and run hotel ads for retargeting campaigns. Because traffic being driven by your prospecting campaigns will be “caught” by ads from the retargeting campaigns, this can in turn help drive conversions.

Because you've already configured your hotel catalog, pixel, and ad template, most of the work is already done. The main difference is that when you define your audience, you will select the Use info from your pixel or app to create a retargeting audience option rather than the Define a broad audience and let Facebook optimize who sees your products option.

Create Your Ad

Follow the ad creation instructions here, and pay special attention to the Fill in the Audience section.

Upselling & Loyalty Programs

Use Hotel Ads to Drive Ancillary Revenue (upsell) or Associated Actions Before a Guest's Trip

In general, people book their hotels weeks or even months before their trip. But for other travel-related products (such as upgrades, promotions, reservations and more), people often book these just a few days before their departure. Additional sales from these products and services provide ancillary revenue to hotel industries.

Rather than relying on emails or face-to-face interactions at check-in and customer service desks to drive this revenue, advertisers can use hotel ads on Facebook. With hotel ads, you can create ads geared towards driving ancillary revenue from people who've already booked hotels through your services.

Hoteliers can use hotel ads to:

Highlight premium inventory and entice passengers to upgrade their rooms
Grow their loyalty programs and services
Drive awareness of onsite amenities, such as spas and restaurants

Example: Use Hotel Ads to Grow your Loyalty Base

Step 1: Create a campaign

Go to ad creation.
Select Product Catalog Sales.
Select the product catalog that contains the hotel inventory you want to promote.

Step 2: Create an audience

Select your Hotel Set or create a new one.
Find the Event source group section.

Limit audience to events within All Hotels

Find the Include section, where you can set specific targeting parameters that allow you to target people who are checking into their hotel in the coming days.
Click the drop-down and select Purchase.
Click the next drop-down and select Hotel.
Capture all bookers in the maximum recency window Facebook offers (180 days).
For this ad, we want to target customers who have a check-in date in the next 10 days and automatically stop showing them ads after their check-in date has passed. To do this, check the box next to Booking window and set the timeframe for 0-10 days.

Once you're finished with your audience, click Save Audience.
Fill in the Placements and Budget & Schedule sections.

Step 3: Create your ad

With hotel ads, you can show dynamic information based on the specific property a person has booked. The ability to show creative with exact property and date information allows you to upsell your audience with promotions, upgrades, loyalty program memberships and more.

Select the Page that you'd like to promote in your ad.
Go to the Format section and choose Single Image.
For creative, we recommend using the template tags {{hotel.name}}, {{hotel.description}}, {{hotel.brand}} and {{trip.checkin_date}} to insert dynamic information based on the hotel a person has booked while highlighting the appropriate promotion (for example, 'join our loyalty program', 'book spa services' , 'make a reservation in our restaurant' and so on). Example copy:

Post Text: Get free Wi-Fi during your stay at {{hotel.name}} if you join Jasper's Loyalty before you check in!

Link Headline: Join Jasper's Loyalty

Link Description: Get Free Wi-Fi, Earn Points and redeem member exclusive offers when you join Jasper's Loyalty.
Select the appropriate tracking and click Place Order.

Considerations

In addition to the steps suggested above, you should also consider some of the unique ways your modified Hotel catalog makes it easy to efficiently drive upgrades and ancillary revenue. For example:

You might encourage people who have booked a standard room to upgrade by letting Facebook serve them creative for exactly the types of rooms most likely to appeal to them.
Rather than setting up separate one-off ads promoting each of your services, amenities, restaurants and so on to your guests, run a single hotel ads campaign promoting all of them and let Facebook's recommendation engine decide which item is most likely to appeal to a given guest.