Marketing

🏠 Expedia Taap offers travel agencies a minimum 25% discount on hotel bookings to celebrate spring. This limited-time promotion is exclusively for partner agencies, applicable on thousands of hotels worldwide. Agencies must book by March 31, 2025, for travel by September 8, 2025, enabling them to provide global hotel savings, boost bookings, maximize sales, and increase customer satisfaction.

🏆 Guiness Travel, with product manager Michele Mosca, targets India and Indochina for growth in 2025, offering tours with a 70% repeater rate at guaranteed prices. In 2024, the company saw a revenue increase of 32% over 2023. New programs, running from August to April 2026, include four Indian itineraries, three with direct flights from Rome via Ita Airways, and extended options for Nepal, Bhutan, and Indochina due to high demand. Demand spikes in Japan led to alternative circuits like those in Hokkaido.

📆 During Easter, Italians have 16 days of vacation but only 7 days of leave. Skyscanner's report reveals an 85% intent among Italians to travel more in 2023 compared to 2024. Popular destinations vary by departure airport: both Milan and Rome favor Tenerife, while Milan passengers also choose Palermo and Catania, and Rome passengers opt for Paris and Dubai. Tokyo is a top choice for both, matching the growing travel trend of Horti-culture, with 50% of Italians wishing to witness the cherry blossom season in 2025.

📣 Google's Performance Max for hotels, an AI-based Google Ads campaign, maximizes direct booking opportunities across 7 Google channels: Hotel Ads, Search, Gmail, YouTube, Discover, Display, and Maps. Benefits include more direct bookings, audience expansion, direct customer relationships, and simplified management. Notable results show a +33% increase in bookings, +194% in revenue, +215% in conversion rate, and +120% in value per booking. Source: Nozio Wolf Business Intelligence. Use Performance Max to enhance direct sales with AI-powered ad campaigns visible across all relevant customer journey touchpoints.

🌿 13 days of slow tourism between Easter and May 1st, promoted by Airbnb and evidenced by a YouGov survey. 25% of Italians prefer slow tourism, 50% choose rural destinations with Tuscany, Sicily, and Sardinia as top choices. Italy has 11.8 million slow tourists, with 30% nearing burn-out needing to slow down. Popular Airbnb stays include restored barns and villas, with Italians favoring 'Amato dagli ospiti' (over 2 million hosts) collection. 58% of Airbnb guests plan at least 7-day rural stays for the upcoming spring break to avoid overtourism.

📧 Sojern has introduced a fully managed email marketing service for hoteliers as part of its Commission Multichannel Offering. The service aims to simplify marketing, increase direct bookings, retain guests, and decrease reliance on online travel agencies. It leverages Sojern's AI marketing platform and combines their Guest Marketing Suite with the expertise of email designers and copywriters. Noreen Henry, Chief Revenue Officer of Sojern, highlighted that 90% of consumers expect personalized experiences from brands. The service provides targeted and branded content to enhance engagement, direct bookings, and customer loyalty.

📱 RHC Group launched their new website, in partnership with Blastness, showcasing full-screen videos of their hotel and resort locations including Rome's Palazzo Montemartini, Taormina's La Plage Resort, and two options in the Amalfi Coast: Hotel Raito and Paradiso Relais. The site offers detailed services for each property, from room types to dining, events, wellness, and local experiences like guided Etna jeep tours, wine tastings, boat trips, trekking, and exclusive museum visits in Rome. Rhcgroup.it also features direct booking with special deals and a dedicated section for job opportunities, following a rebranding to improve market positioning and visual identity.

📂 In 2025 at ITB, Yannis Simaiakis of Google revealed that 15% of the last year's searches were unprecedented, indicating a post-pandemic surge in traveler curiosity. Google is enhancing its search experience with text, image, video searches, and Lens. They're developing new page layouts and scrolls for complex, long, and specific queries. With 60% of users open to new experiences, these targeted results could lead to more bookings for destinations and businesses.

🏢 Expedia Taap met with Italian travel agencies at Baglioni hotel Regina in Rome. The event included a presentation highlighting Expedia Taap's program strengths and the extensive Expedia catalog, which features over 3 million properties maintained by more than 2,000 global specialists. The objective is to replicate this successful event at different locations.

💰 Hotels collaborating with D-EDGE incur an average direct distribution cost of just 3.5%, compared to the 12-28% typically charged by Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). With data from Europe and APAC, the report highlights the advantages of direct bookings: lower acquisition costs, higher revenue per booking, longer stays, and fewer cancellations, urging hotels to adopt key digital marketing strategies to boost direct revenues and reduce reliance on costly channels.