At Simplotel we have built websites for over 2,000 hotels, and every single time we have been asked about how we drive traffic to a website. We have been asked by those who are usually suspicious of SEO because they paid for such services in past and may or may not have seen results. And we have been asked by our customers who see a 3x plus growth in their website traffic after coming to our platform – as to how we do it. While SEO can be a deep subject, today we will attempt to outline how one must think about SEO in this post.

At a high level SEO depends on three things –

Technology and layout of the website
The content on the website
Things happening outside your website

Technology and layout of the website

In order to determine the relevance of a website for a search term (also known as a keyword) search engines have a piece of software called a Bot (derived from the word Robot) that crawls (think of it as reads) content on your website. The Bot then stores the keywords that a website is most relevant for. This is known as indexing of a website.

Unlike users, bots see the code of the website and not what users see on a website (you can view the code of most websites by right clicking on a webpage and selecting view page source). The easier this code is for the search engines to understand, the better chance you have of conveying your content to the search engines and making sure that your content gets indexed correctly. Here again there are hundreds of things that matter. These include the load time of a website, the structure of website code, mobile friendliness, proper tags and sitemaps. Detailing these is a topic for a future blog.

The layout of your website also plays an important role in search engine optimization. Clean and simple navigation, easily readable content – they all add up towards SEO friendliness.
To get these things right a website must be built for SEO from the ground up – retrofitting these things can often mean redoing the website. The good news is that Simplotel, out of the box, takes care of all this for your hotel website.

The content on your website

Now that we have gotten the technical aspects covered, the next most obvious thing about SEO is the content of the website. If your website’s content is about ice cream cones then your site will be indexed for ice cream cone searches and not for hotels. If your content is about a luxury hotel, then you won’t be indexed for budget hotels and consequently it is unlikely that you will show up for searches related to budget hotels.

Content also comes in many shapes. It includes the text on the website, the images that you put, the links you provide and the various tags (page titles page descriptions etc.). Each one of these have a significance and how and where you place them also matters. Content that is higher up on a page matters more than the content that is below. On things like page titles, the content that is to the left matters more than the content that is to the right. How you structure your content with various Headers (much like a word document) matters. How you name your images, how you name the links – they all matter.

All content on your website should be original content – copying of content from another website hurts your traffic – as the search engines and users skip past you believing you have nothing new to say. Adding fresh and relevant content has also shown to impact the SEO of a website.

There is also data about your hotel (meta data) that you can provide on your website, it is not visible to your customers but tells the bots the location, name, etc. of your hotel. Once again, Simplotel does this out of the box for your site. Our experts write the content for your hotel website so that it is all set up well. This is another reason why our customers see a 3x plus growth in traffic.

Things happening outside your website

After the technology and the content on the website, there are things that happen outside your website that impact search engine optimization. These include your guest reviews, your listing on Google Maps and local listing sites, your mention in travel blogs, etc. – they all matter. Here are some suggestions,

Verify and own your Google My Business (GMB) page and make sure that the map marker is accurate.
Ensure that your hotel’s name, address and contact info is exactly the same on all online channels – your social media pages, local listings and classified listings.
Get good reviews by taking care of customers and encouraging customers to write a glowing review. Also, respond to your reviews on various review channels time to time.

There are few silver bullets in SEO – so you must skin it with a thousand paper cuts. Please let us know your comments, questions and feedback at hello@simplotel.com.

Home > Blogs > Rate Parity Is Dead: How Hotels Can Win Back Control and Direct Bookings

Rate Parity Is Dead: How Hotels Can Win Back Control and Direct Bookings

For years, hotel distribution strategy revolved around maintaining rate parity: the insistence that the same room price must be displayed on OTAs, the brand’s own website, metasearch platforms, and across all wholesalers.

But in today’s competitive landscape, experts agree - strict rate parity is officially over. Instead, modern hoteliers face a complex web of channel partners, discount stacking, and rate leakage, making traditional parity both impractical and obsolete.

The Old Parity Model And Why It’s Broken

Rate parity clauses, designed by OTAs to ensure competitive pricing, originally helped level the playing field. They incentivized hotels to keep public rates consistent, preventing OTAs from being undercut and ensuring guests wouldn’t see wildly different prices across platforms.

But digital transformation and channel proliferation introduced problems that parity agreements cannot solve:

OTAs now account for 43% of bookings in the US, but their share is dropping as hotels sharpen their direct strategies.
Metasearch platforms (Google Hotel Ads, Trivago, etc.) aggregate prices across OTAs and brands, instantly exposing any disparities and penalizing rate inconsistencies.
Discount stacking, mobile-only deals, and B2B rate leakage make it virtually impossible for any hotel to track, much less enforce, true parity across every booking medium.

How Third-Party Resellers Create Rate Disparity

Hidden Discount Stacking
Hotels often run legitimate promotions: mobile rates, private member deals, or country-specific offers. But OTAs frequently stack their own (often hidden) discounts on top exclusive campaigns, member-only reductions, or targeted flash sales, resulting in deferred revenue and sometimes60 - 80% real price cuts from BAR (Best Available Rate). Worse, many discounts aren’t visible to hotels in their extranet, eroding ADR and hurting margin, while undermining guest trust in direct channel pricing.

Rate Leakage from B2B Wholesalers
When B2B rates slip onto public-facing OTAs or metasearch, everything suffers. These rates were designed for corporate or group partners, not for retail travelers, and their appearance can mean guests see drastically different rates for the same room, damaging conversions and brand perception.

Metasearch Dynamics
Metasearch engines are where most guests begin their journey. If an OTA undercuts the hotel’s own price, metasearch algorithms penalize it, lowering its visibility, even if it spends heavily on ads. The result: fewer direct conversions and weaker performance across all channels.

Direct Booking Cannibalization
When the direct website price is higher than the OTA price, conversion plummets, often below 3%. Keep prices at parity or beat OTAs andconversion can jump by as much as 56%. For many hotels, this means lost profit through higher OTA commissions and fewer direct relationships.

Towards a “Post-Parity” Strategy

The problem isn’t disparity itself; it’s lack of control. Forward-thinking hoteliers leverage controlled rate disparity as a tactical advantage, targeting offers and segments, complying with most OTA contracts while maximizing profit and occupancy.

Controlled Disparity Tactics

Mobile-Only Discounts: Target last-minute, mobile device traffic with unbeatable deals inaccessible to desktop users or OTAs.
Fenced Member Rates: Loyalty program perks, accessible only to logged-in members, remain compliant with most parity rules and drive direct traffic.
Opaque Bundling: Move unsold inventory via curated packages, such as adding breakfasts or tours, exclusive to select resellers, avoiding direct channel cannibalization.

Rate Intelligence Tools

Monitor parity in real time
Identify troublesome channels and out-of-sync rates
Alert teams to hidden discounts eroding revenue
Benchmark campaign ROI across platforms

Smart Channel Management
Tier your channels. Prioritize brand.com and top OTAs, but segment wholesalers and flash sale partners as strategic fill or low-season solutions. Use a centralized channel manager to push rates, automate promotions, and keep base prices consistent.

Turn Audit into Action
Don’t just check extranet rates, conduct guest-side test bookings and mystery shopping to see final prices and offers in real time. Immediately address any hidden stacking, discount abuse, or B2B leakage.

Additional Key Considerations

B2B Rate Leakage: Segregate and Secure: Always keep group, corporate, and wholesale rates isolated from retail channels. Offer dynamic static rates, run limited-exposure deals, and only upload B2B pricing to tightly controlled platforms. Otherwise, you risk ADR erosion and a direct hit to RevPAR.
Direct Pricing Alignment for Conversion: Hotels lose out when their own websites don’t compete with OTA rates. Elevate direct channel value with best rate guarantees, added perks, loyalty bonuses, and more flexible cancellation policies. Keep direct prices in sync, or smarter still, just below OTAs - to multiply your conversion rate and save on commission costs.

Shift Your Revenue Management Mindset
Hotels must evolve from rate administrators to strategy-first digital retailers:

Who are you targeting with each price?
Where do your guests really book?
What perks and visuals sell the story on your website?
How does your offer compare side-by-side with OTAs on metasearch?

By prioritizing precision, creativity, and intentionality, hotels transform rate disparities into revenue-optimizing strategies and regain control of their distribution futures.