Yes, run a funded brand campaign, and do it this week. Affiliates and OTAs will keep bidding on your hotel’s name whether you compete or not, and Google’s auction now weights price accuracy and itinerary matching as heavily as bid amount. Before you raise a single bid, open your Hotel Center feed and confirm your rates and booking path are accurate. That is the first hour’s work.
TL;DR:
- Affiliates and OTAs treat hotel names as inventory, bidding on brand terms using mimicry and redirect tactics to capture bookings and earn commissions.
- Google’s new bidding models require accurate, itinerary-matched rates; incomplete feeds can exclude hotels from auctions regardless of bid amount.
- Running a brand defense campaign involves verifying feed accuracy, targeting your hotel name with clear offers, and monitoring for repeated affiliate bidding issues.
- Trademark complaints restrict deceptive ad copy but do not prevent affiliates from bidding on your hotel name as a keyword.
- Continuous, real-time monitoring and feed fixes are essential to prevent affiliate bidding from draining your direct booking share.
Table of Contents
- Why affiliates and OTAs bid on your hotel’s name
- What changed in Google Hotel Ads bidding
- Building a brand defense campaign: the checklist
- What trademark complaints can and cannot fix
- How to measure whether brand defense is working
- A continuous monitoring and response workflow
- What independent operators get wrong about brand bidding
- FAQ
- Sources
Why affiliates and OTAs bid on your hotel’s name
Affiliate networks treat hotel brand names as inventory. A mid-size network can run brand-term campaigns against thousands of properties at once, using automated rules that adjust bids by time of day and device. For an independent hotel, this means you are not fighting one rival. You are fighting a system built to intercept anyone searching your own name.
The pattern repeats across markets. Someone searches “Seaside Inn Key West,” and the top result is an ad that mimics your name, sometimes your exact rate, sometimes a slightly lower one, leading to a page that redirects through an affiliate link before landing on a booking engine. You still get the booking, technically, but a commission gets paid to a party that did nothing to earn the guest.
A few patterns show up again and again:
- Ad copy mirrors your hotel name and tagline closely enough to pass casual review.
- Landing pages redirect through tracking parameters that attach an affiliate ID before the booking completes.
- Rates shown in the ad do not match your actual price, created to win the click rather than reflect availability.
Independent hotels are especially exposed because you rarely run a brand campaign at all. Branded hotel groups budget for this defensively as a matter of course. A 30-room boutique property in South Florida often has no brand campaign running, leaving the branded search term wide open for anyone willing to bid on it.
What changed in Google Hotel Ads bidding
Google retired commission-based bidding for Hotel Ads. Advertisers who paid Google a commission per conversion or per completed stay had to migrate to a different bid model entirely. Commission-based bid strategies were deprecated for new campaigns starting April 30, 2024, and retired for active campaigns by February 20, 2025.
That leaves a smaller, more hands-on set of options:
| Bid strategy | How it works | Best fit |
|---|---|---|
| Target ROAS | Sets bids to hit a return-on-ad-spend goal you define | Hotels with steady conversion history |
| Enhanced CPC | Adjusts manual bids up or down based on conversion likelihood | Hotels still building conversion data |
| Manual CPC/CPC% | You set the bid or a percentage of the booking value directly | Hotels wanting tight control over spend |
| Performance Max for travel goals | Google manages bidding and placement across properties toward a travel objective | Hotels with clean feeds and conversion tracking already in place |
None of these strategies work well on a sloppy feed. Per Google’s bidding overview for hotel ads, incomplete tax data, missing itinerary-specific rates, or account status problems can exclude a hotel from the auction entirely, regardless of bid. Auction rank itself weighs price accuracy and how well the offer matches what the traveler searched for, not bid size alone, according to Google’s documentation on hotel campaigns. A hotel bidding aggressively on a feed with stale rates can lose to a competitor bidding less but showing an accurate, itinerary-matched price.
Building a brand defense campaign: the checklist
Two separate auctions compete for your hotel’s name: standard Google Ads text campaigns and Hotel campaigns that show live rates. Winning one does not win the other, and most independent hotels only set up, at most, one of the two.
Here is the order of operations that works:
- Audit your Hotel Center feed first. Check that rates, taxes, and availability match what guests see on your own site. A broken feed disqualifies you from auctions before bidding even matters.
- Launch a text-based brand campaign targeting your own hotel name and close variants. Budget roughly 60% of your brand-defense spend here; this is the cheapest auction to win because fewer affiliates bother running text ads against a small property’s exact name.
- Fund a Hotel campaign in parallel. Put the remaining 40% here, since this is where OTAs and affiliates show competing rates directly next to yours.
- Write ad copy that states your name, your direct rate, and one concrete trust signal such as free cancellation or a loyalty perk, not generic claims.
- Confirm your landing page shows the same rate as the ad, loads in a few seconds, and lets a guest book in three steps or fewer.
- Set your conversion category to “Purchase” in Google Ads, and reconcile completed bookings against your property management system weekly to catch attribution gaps.
Pro Tip: A modest monthly brand campaign budget can be enough for a property under 50 rooms; the goal is presence in the auction, not outbidding a national affiliate network dollar for dollar.
Our guide to hotel booking funnel optimization for direct reservations covers the landing-page side of this checklist in more detail.
What trademark complaints can and cannot fix
A lot of hoteliers assume filing a trademark complaint will stop affiliates from bidding on their name. It will not. Google’s trademark policy can restrict the use of your trademark inside the ad text itself when it finds the copy confusing or deceptive, but it does not prevent a competitor or affiliate from bidding on your name as a keyword.
That distinction matters for how you spend your time. A complaint can get a specific ad pulled if it misuses your name in the headline or description. It will not stop a different affiliate from launching a near-identical ad the next day, and it does nothing to improve your own standing in the Hotel campaign auction.
A workable escalation path:
- File a trademark complaint through Google’s standard process when an ad’s text, not just its targeting, uses your name deceptively.
- Screenshot the offending ad, note the advertiser domain, and log the date, since repeat offenders often rotate accounts.
- Track how often the same domain or a close variant reappears after a complaint resolves.
- Call legal counsel when a pattern suggests outright impersonation, like a cloned logo or copied photography, rather than simple keyword bidding.
Treat brand text campaigns and Hotel campaigns as separate, parallel defenses, since a complaint win in one does not touch the other.
How to measure whether brand defense is working
The right question is not “did bookings go up.” It is whether the bookings you got were incremental, meaning they would not have happened anyway through another channel at a worse margin.
Three numbers matter more than raw click volume:
- Incremental direct bookings: reservations attributable to the brand campaign that would otherwise have gone to an OTA or affiliate.
- Contribution margin: booking revenue minus the commission you would have paid an OTA, not just the ad spend.
- Cost per incremental booking: your brand campaign spend divided by the bookings judged incremental, not total conversions.
A 2026 high-frequency study of five full-service hotels found that price differences across channels reallocated demand rather than reliably increasing total demand, with effects that were nonlinear and property-specific. That is a caution against judging brand defense purely by “cheapest wins.” A simple holdout test, pausing brand bids on a randomly chosen week or across a subset of your properties, paired with a contribution-margin calculation, reveals incrementality more reliably than raw booking counts.
Attribution has a trap built in: OTA dashboards and Google Ads reporting often both claim credit for the same guest under last-click rules. Reconcile against your PMS weekly, and expect small-sample weeks to swing widely, so judge trends over a month, not a single week. Our piece on why direct bookings create stronger demand signals goes deeper on the margin side of this math.
A continuous monitoring and response workflow
Periodic audits, say once a quarter, miss the problem entirely. Affiliate networks rotate accounts and automate bidding at a scale that makes a quarterly check nearly pointless by the time you catch anything, according to industry reporting on how hotel brand search and affiliate bidding has industrialized. A workable cadence is real-time alerts for your own brand term plus a daily five-minute check of the search results page.
A practical response sequence:
- Detect: search your own hotel name from an incognito browser, or set a Google Alert, to see what’s actually showing.
- Verify: click through to confirm the offending URL redirects through an affiliate link or shows a mismatched rate.
- File: submit a trademark complaint only if the ad text itself, not just the targeting, misuses your name.
- Adjust: raise your own brand bid or tighten ad scheduling if the same offender reappears at a specific time of day.
- Fix: correct any feed or landing-page issue the detection step surfaced, since a stale rate is often the real reason you lost the click.
Pro Tip: Log every detection with a date and screenshot; a pattern of three or more incidents from related domains is worth a monitoring tool or an agency relationship, while a single isolated ad usually is not.
Decide to bring in outside help when the daily check starts eating more than 20 to 30 minutes, or when you cannot tell from the feed data alone why a booking attributed to your brand campaign isn’t showing up in your PMS.
What independent operators get wrong about brand bidding
Most hotels either skip brand campaigns entirely, assuming their name is safe, or they fund one once and never look again. Both mistakes cost real money. The operators who hold onto direct share treat brand defense as a standing line item, not a reaction to a bad month.
The short list that actually works: fund a brand campaign before you need it, fix your feed before you raise bids, measure contribution margin instead of raw bookings, and build a monitoring habit instead of waiting for a complaint to fix things. Skipping the feed fix is the most common error. A hotel with an inaccurate Hotel Center feed loses the auction before the bidding strategy even matters.
, Chris
FAQ
What is the 15/5 rule in hotels?
The 15/5 rule isn’t a standard industry term with a fixed definition in hotel marketing or revenue management; usage varies by source and context. If you encountered it in a specific vendor’s material, it likely refers to a proprietary benchmark rather than an established industry standard, or you might explore other alternatives to Airbnb for hosts to maximize your income.
Can you bid on hotels anymore?
Yes. Google removed commission-based bidding for Hotel Ads, but advertisers can still bid using Target ROAS, Enhanced CPC, or manual strategies. Performance Max for travel goals is also available for hotels with clean feeds and conversion tracking in place.
Is $200 a night for a hotel expensive?
Whether a nightly rate is expensive depends entirely on the market, season, and property type, since rates vary widely by city and category. A boutique property in a major metro and a roadside motel in a small town occupy very different price tiers, so there’s no single industry benchmark for what counts as expensive.
What are the top 5 luxury hotel brands?
There’s no single authoritative ranking of the top five luxury hotel brands, since rankings shift based on criteria like guest satisfaction, room count, or revenue, and different publications use different methodologies. This article focuses on independent hotel marketing rather than brand rankings, so we’d point you to a dedicated hospitality ranking source for that comparison.
Does filing a trademark complaint stop affiliates from bidding on my name?
No. A trademark complaint can get Google to restrict confusing or deceptive use of your name in ad text, but it does not stop competitors or affiliates from bidding on your hotel name as a keyword.