Home > Blogs > The ABCs of SEO for hotels

The ABCs of SEO for hotels

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 > The Hidden Costs of Switching Your Hotel’s Booking Engine: Why It Might Not Be Worth It

The Hidden Costs of Switching Your Hotel’s Booking Engine: Why It Might Not Be Worth It

In a world obsessed with newer, shinier tools, it's easy to be lured into switching your hotel’s booking engine for one that promises more features, better performance, or sleeker design. But before you make that leap, it’s crucial to ask: what will it actually cost you?

No, we’re not just talking about setup fees or training expenses. We’re talking about opportunity cost, the bookings you might lose, the loyalty you might sacrifice, and the operational chaos you might invite, all in pursuit of something that may not even deliver as promised.

Let’s unpack why switching your booking engine might not be the game-changer it appears to be and why it could, in fact, do more harm than good.

1. Booking Disruptions = Real Revenue Loss

Perhaps the most dangerous consequence of switching booking engines is the inevitable downtime or errors during the transition.

Even with a perfectly planned migration, things go wrong. URLs break. Old links stop working. Guest sessions are interrupted. You might think it’s a minor hiccup, but even a few hours of booking issues during peak season can have a cascading effect on revenue, guest experience, and staff morale.

Real-life example:
A boutique hotel in Goa that transitioned to a new booking engine right before the Christmas season saw a 25% dip in direct bookings over two critical weeks. Their links on Google Hotel Ads led to broken pages, and guests called in complaining they couldn’t reserve rooms. By the time it was fixed, those bookings had already gone to OTAs or worse, competitors.

2. Integration Nightmares

Most hotels today don’t operate in silos. Your booking engine talks to your PMS, which connects to your channel manager, CRM, payment gateway, and sometimes even your loyalty system.

Switching your booking engine risks breaking these integrations or forcing you to reinvest in setting them up from scratch. And let’s not forget: no two booking engines are identical. What your old platform handled seamlessly may now require custom development, manual workarounds, or additional tools.

Worse still, if your tech vendor isn’t familiar with your operational ecosystem, expect weeks (if not months) of painful ticketing, patching, and reconfiguring.

3. Training is Time. Time is Money.

The best booking engine in the world is useless if your front desk, reservation team, and revenue manager don’t know how to use it.

New platforms require training, adjustment periods, and internal adoption, and while most vendors offer onboarding, the learning curve is real especially for teams already stretched thin.

Every moment spent figuring out a new dashboard or fixing a pricing rule is a moment not spent delighting guests or focusing on your core business. And if you have staff turnover, you’ll have to keep training all over again.

4. Not All That Glitters Is Gold: The False Promise of “Better Features”

Many hoteliers switch engines because the new one promises automation, better UX, mobile-first design, or dynamic pricing.

But here’s the catch: those features may not deliver ROI unless you already have the strategy, team, and tech stack to support them. A feature-rich system is no good if it’s underutilised, misunderstood, or incompatible with your current workflows.

And ironically, the very tools you’re switching for like upselling, promos, or recovery emails may already exist in your current engine… you just haven’t unlocked their potential yet.

5. Risk to Your Existing SEO & Direct Booking Flow

Your hotel website and booking engine are deeply intertwined when it comes to SEO and booking flows.
A new engine may change URL structures, tracking scripts, or even delay page loads all of which can impact your organic traffic and user experience.

You may also lose precious data tied to past guest behaviours, traffic patterns, or source attribution if your new platform doesn’t carry that over.

Bottom line: you're not just switching tools, you're resetting a system that’s probably been quietly working behind the scenes to grow your direct revenue.

But What About the Benefits?

Yes, switching booking engines can bring improvements: faster UX, better conversion, slicker mobile design, or integrations with marketing tools.

But even those come with caveats:

Increased bookings? Only if SEO, pricing, and marketing are aligned.
Better customer experience? Only if the transition is seamless.
Reduced ops cost? Only if you don’t end up hiring extra support to manage the shift.
Better analytics? Only if your team knows how to interpret and use the data.

In other words, benefits don’t come guaranteed, they come with fine print.

Final Thoughts: Switch Smart Or Don’t Switch At All

Switching your hotel’s booking engine isn’t just a tech decision, it's a business risk. The hidden opportunity costs, lost bookings, broken systems, distracted teams, and diminished SEO can silently erode the very growth you’re hoping to accelerate.

If your current engine is outdated, underperforming, or unsupported, yes it may be time to explore options. But if it’s working well, and you simply want more from it, switching might not be the smartest path forward.

Sometimes, the best solution isn’t to rebuild it’s to optimize what’s already working.